William McDonough Quotes

What we call 'economic growth' is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today" and, "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox

Before we start criticizing capitalism, we ought to try it. We don't factor the value of nature and its services into the market equation. Every year we use roughly $33 trillion worth of nature's services throughout the world's civilizations, and we make little or no effort to pay any of that back. We just use it. Look at the service a bee provides us, for example. A bee doesn't charge hourly fees or anything else. But if we lose the bees, we're not going to eat. And the pollinators are disappearing.

The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth's limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.

Despite widely differing perspectives and agendas, there seems to be a remarkable global consensus that has built up over a fairly short period of time that climate change and ecology is one of the truly defining issues for humanity.

I think all the garbage in the world is thanks to a very small handful of idiots.

The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

We can't continue to take from our planet the way we do and not give anything back, and the idea of, 'Oh, but it's fine, I won't have to deal with it in my lifetime,' well, you need to think about the future generations who will have to deal with it.

We have to have a planet to pass on to the next generation, and these issues of climate change and climate justice and the disproportionate burdens that communities of color actually bear from our damaging climate is a huge issue.

I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.

Human nature is to blame for everything, innit? We're just a disease on this planet.

I think the environment is the biggest threat mankind has ever faced.

In this post-industrial society, when we're moving away from what was the norm, we have to deal with what it has left in its wake in terms of the impact on people and the environment.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

In the Mediterranean of my childhood, there were no large groupers, sharks, or whales. All I saw was seaweed and a few fish, smaller than my little diving mask. All the large animals were gone, simply because we had eaten them.

The tragic side of many architectural enterprises is that they destroy natural beauties which are a priceless possession and cannot be replaced.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.