Alex Steffen Quotes

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

If left unchecked, global change will create violent conflict, torrential storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

The environmental movement, like all political processes, reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow, very gradual disasters in the making.

I can't even consider the prospect of grandchildren because I don't know if there will be anything left for them on Earth. That's how serious the problem is. We can't drink the water or breathe the air, and we're all dying from some sort of cancer. How many generations can sustain that? It frightens me terribly.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

Ultimately, here is the choice we face: we can either make the solution to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of civilization–or the hostile conditions we are creating will grow rapidly worse, thickening the smothering blanket of global warming pollution surrounding our planet and destroy the viability of civilization as we know it.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

China is the world’s second largest economy, but the enormous costs of its growth are becoming apparent. Residents of its boom cities and a growing number of rural regions question the safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. It is as if they were living in the Chinese equivalent of the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disaster areas. The environmental hazards here are legion, and the consequences might not manifest themselves for years or even decades.

The plundering for profit of the world's natural resources has threatened the very sustainability of the planet.

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks.

The doomsayers of the 1970s were wrong about how quickly the world would run out of oil, but not about the dangers that hydrocarbon consumption posed to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change.

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it's all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.