Environmental Constraints Quotes

A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?

Growth chestnuts have to be placed on the unyielding anvil of biophysical realities and then crushed with the hammer of moral argument.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

The transformation of capitalism is unstoppable because we need limits on resources for humans to survive.

In the crowded and difficult conditions of a steep hillside, houses have had to struggle to establish their territory and to survive.

Those of us concerned with developing new technology should consider ourselves to have a major undertaking to try to meet the expanding needs of the increasing number of people in the world with its finite resources and environments constraints.

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.

We have never been in danger of running out of resources, but we have encountered considerable dangers from people who say we are running out of resources and who say that human activities need to be constrained.

The truth is this: the Earth cannot provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools.

We have eco-friendly shrimp. We can make them; we have that technology. But we can never have an eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. It doesn't work.

This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.

Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.

There is a lot of flesh to be put on the bones - but there is at least an opening for a more pragmatic, less ideological debate about how to build economies that work for people, within the limits of our planet.

A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?

We see an entire planet which has many limitations.

Seems you can't outsmart Mother Nature.

I always loved clothes, just not clothes that were appropriate to the place I grew up in.

I enjoyed the army reserve, and I learned a lot from it, but I also... it helped me work out that I didn't want to live in that kind of closed environment.