Rohini Nilekani Quotes

Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources, including oil and gas.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.

The term 'natural resources' confuses people. 'Natural resources' are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

You can't conserve what you haven't got.

The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

In the United States you use more oil than water. Water takes a few days to recycle. Oil takes 4 million years.

The fruits [game and natural resources] may be easier tasted than believed.

In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.

The laws of nature tell us there's a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that's going to run out. And if we're smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.

Energy is probably the most pressing demand on our planet.

Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues.

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.

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.'

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

We've got to take care of the resources we have on this planet, because there's no resupply possible.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.