Chief Seattle Quotes

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.

Good stewardship of the environment and our natural resources is necessary.

Instead of passing on choppy waters to the next generation, we should endeavor to leave them a calmer sea.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

Right now, we don't have a very good relation with creation.

It is not oil or the environment, it is oil and the environment. We are living in the same world. We are not enemies.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that.

There's one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law that's evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.

This whole idea that we address environmental issues by not doing stuff just doesn't work.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies.

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.

We all have an obligation to pass on a better environment to our kids.

We only have one earth. Let's take care of it.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.