Ralph Steadman Quotes

Only people who lack wisdom would say that a project should be pursued even if it leads to wanton destruction of forests.

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

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.

The Prime Minister of India, at a meeting that I co-chaired a few months ago, stated that any development that is not sustainable is not development.

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

Now, the downside to conservation is that so much is done for the public, which almost always mars the environment that one wanted to conserve.

We're the only species that have crapped up the planet and the only species that can clean it up.

If you develop in the old fashioned way there are enormous costs (to the environment)….but we have to demonstrate it, not just tell people.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

We must use the wrath of nature as our teacher.

One cannot take natural resources for granted just to entertain viewers.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States, lives in a mansion that uses more electricity than the average family's bungalow! David Suzuki rides on a bus that uses more fuel than a Smart car to get across Canada! Oh my God! And this is just the tip of the vanishing iceberg!

Every drop in the ocean counts.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

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.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

Conserving habitats is a wellspring for the next industrial revolution.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

I have lots of heroes: anyone and everyone who does whatever they can to leave the natural world better than they found it.

I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.