Elizabeth Wurtzel Quotes

I think having toured the world and seeing many places, I've just been blown away by how we've really scarred our home. I'm as guilty as the next person if not more so. I travel a lot. The damage we do to our planet is huge.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

The combination of population growth and the growth in consumption is a danger that we are not prepared for and something we will need global co-operation on.

My goal is to leave this planet with the biggest carbon footprint I can possibly leave.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

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

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

The worst is yet to come, because all the plastic that is already out there is going to become more hazardous if we don't clean it up.

Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.

We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

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

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

Cabbies in particular seem to like discussing the fate the Earth.

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.