Richard M. Daley Quotes

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

Environmental activism against the resource industry is widespread all over the world, but at the same time we have to realise that these are basic materials on which civilisation depends. We need to tap natural resources in a sustainable manner.

The environmental movement doesn't have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually, there will be open war.

I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us.

This whole idea that we address environmental issues by not doing stuff just doesn't work.

I wouldn't want anyone to destroy the earth.

No day is alike - I do many other things, and I'm very active in the environmental movement.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

Business is a subset of the environment, not the other way around. You can't have a healthy economy, you can't have a healthy anything in a degraded environment.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

I'm on the board of the Sierra Club Foundation and am myself a big environmentalist. But the way to make the biggest difference is to change mainstream behavior.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

How we treat the earth basically effects our social welfare and our national security.

We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

The free market should not include the right to pollute our environment.

Everyone realizes that we have to clean up the environment, but no one likes the cost.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.