Lawrence Summers Quotes

It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere.

Overpopulation is the problem of the third and fourth World; over-consumption is the problem of the West. The average American child this year will consume as much of the world's resources as twenty children born in India. Deliberate and calculated waste is the central aspect of the American economy. We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic wastes upon the earth and into the air.

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable.

Lack of time and money create really bad green practices.

Cut down on your use of plastic shopping bags because many end up in the ocean.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

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.

If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.

I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town. Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me.

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.

They pollute. It's not because morally they have a problem, but more because the mechanism now is rewarding those who cut corners to save cost.

When you pollute a river, it's a supreme injustice to those who are downstream and those who live in the river who are not human beings.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

While cheap products are exported to western countries, the waste is dumped mostly in China's back yard, contaminating its air, water, soil and seas.

Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

On April 16, 2010, 34 Chinese environmental organizations, including Friends of Nature, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, and Green Beagle, questioned heavy metal pollution in a letter sent to CEO Steve Jobs.

Keep talking about moving toxic wastes, but never let it cross your mind to quit producing them. Keep Judging yourselves in Manson. Don't look in the mirror. You will serve the Earth as much as she serves you or you will commit suicide.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

If they [the Federal government] can't handle the [toxic] waste, they shouldn't generate it.

What is truly frightening is that, despite our knowledge, we continue to subsidize activities without regard to their environmental—and economic—impact.

Environmental crimes often and in death and disease

The nation's coal is stained with blood.

Solution to pollution by dilution is fallacious.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.