Planetary Degradation Quotes

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.

Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It's bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well.

In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth's geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.

As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

The retreat and disappearance of glaciers—there are only 160,000 left—means we're burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by bit, glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we're living the Fall.

Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars.

We're going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years - if not longer - to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don't know yet. But we will turn the ship.

The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet.

The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.

The ocean is dying, and we have no place to escape to if this experiment doesn't go in our favor.