Sarah Parcak Quotes

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises - car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

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

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

People who, whether they inhabit the desert or settled areas and cities, live a life of abundance and have all the good things to eat, die more quickly than others when a drought or famine comes upon them

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

Global warming may be a 'crisis,' even 'the most pressing environmental problem of our time.' ... Indeed, it may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way, and it may be that governments have done too little to address it. It is not a problem, however, that has escaped the attention of policymakers in the Executive and Legislative Branches of our Government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative, and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change.

We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that are now threatening human life and much of the rest of life on earth. Our crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of decision of policy and action.

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days.

We are facing a whole collection of crisis-like developments that we have to watch closely. But we also have to be careful what we point to as crisis indicators.

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

What's personally sustainable is globally sustainable.

My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.

Climate change is an economic, public health, and environmental issue that we have a moral responsibility to address.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

If our system continues without modification involving environmental and social concern, we will face an economic and social breakdown of our outdated monetary and political system.

We are grounded in the reality of the day and grounded in the technology of the day. Just saying 'turn the taps off' is not acceptable to humanity.

Ecology and economy are becoming inextricably entwined, and the world is becoming more conscious of this fact.

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.

That's what hurts the environmental movement - holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away.

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