Ecological Debt Quotes

The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.

Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.

Before we start criticizing capitalism, we ought to try it. We don't factor the value of nature and its services into the market equation. Every year we use roughly $33 trillion worth of nature's services throughout the world's civilizations, and we make little or no effort to pay any of that back. We just use it. Look at the service a bee provides us, for example. A bee doesn't charge hourly fees or anything else. But if we lose the bees, we're not going to eat. And the pollinators are disappearing.

We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent, and I'm doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia.

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.

The world owes an ecological debt to the African continent.

National parks are the best expression of social equity that there is. It's like paying our rent for living on the planet.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

I believe everyone who breathes air on this earth, regardless of their job or their bank account, must give back more than just carbon dioxide.

What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.

Man owes two solemn debts--one to society, and one to-nature. It is only when he pays the second that he covers the first.