Environmental Degradation Quotes

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.

We must adjust our value systems and work to modify today's societies, in which economic interests are carried to the extreme and irrationally produce not merely objects, but weapons of war. These societies don't care about the destruction of the planet and mankind as long as they earn profits - it can't go on like this.

Pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources depend and will depend in the future on the absolute level of total economic activity. This means that is necessary to restrain both the rate of growth of population and, at least in the developed countries, the rate of growth of consumption per head.

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Rome is the most dreadful cesspit … the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.

To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing

For the most part we don’t have an immediate impact on the species that surrounds us. But we do have an immediate impact on their habitat which determines whether they survive on in some cases shift their ground.

We are consuming our forests three times faster than they are being reproduced. Some of the richest timber lands of this continent have already been destroyed, and not replaced, and other vast areas are on the verge of destruction. Yet forests, unlike mines, can be so handled as to yield the best results of use, without exhaustion, just like grain fields.

It's obvious that China faces a range of demographic and economic difficulties stemming from its own population growth, and that the global community has a vested interest in avoiding the worst impacts of that growth.

I'm running because I think the world is falling apart.

...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.

Doom yourself to horrific climate change by burning all that carbon and releasing all that CO2. Or power down society, reducing total energy usage around the planet. One leads to ecological collapse. The other is a reversion, in many ways, to poverty.

As for climate change, it's by now widely accepted by the scientific community that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which the Earth's climate is being radically modified by human action, creating a very different planet, one that may not be able to sustain organized human life in anything like a form we would want to tolerate.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the laborer.

I think that at some level, people recognize that growing our economy is destroying us. It's destroying us as human beings, it's destroying our planet.

Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.