Edward Goldsmith Quotes

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.

Developing nations want to become developed nations.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

20 centuries of progress have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account and a high opinion of himself but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

India, China, and Latin America have a tremendous stake in the people's century. As their masses learn to read and write, and as they become productive mechanics, their standard of living will double and treble.

It is impossible for any power to become eminent in commerce, without excelling in manufactures and navigation. America is capable of supporting and increasing both …

Every country has her own way of development.

Over the last three decades, Mexico has made the transition from a commodity and agricultural-based economy to one dominated by manufacturing and services.

We are going to see with our own eyes electricity made so cheap that it would become a standard article for use, not only for manufacturing but for every home…. I know that this empty desert country is going to be filled with men, women and children, making an honest livelihood…

The secret to economic growth lay in the fact that that each generation attacked Nature not only with its own energies and resources, but with the heritage of equipment accumulated by its forebears.

Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

We all know that China is industrializing at a growth rate of 8 to 10 percent per year. China is on track to pass the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 20 to 25 years, and China is determined to give its people a chance at this high standard of living that we enjoy.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

Most countries are static, and they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

This country has been economically successful because of cheap energy and cheap labor and we are never going to have these again.

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

Globalization is about liberalized imports and exports, which makes India export our best natural wealth and import the junk and wasted pollution of international production, including of the Western economies.

Modernization is found in markets.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

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.