Jeremy Jackson Quotes

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

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

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.

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.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level - environmentally, economically, culturally - is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth.

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

We have screwed with our environment. We have a culture that's going crazy, and it's all being propelled by the trillion-dollar advertising corporations.

The uncontrolled and rapacious exploitation of oil has led to unintended consequences, and if we continue on a similar trajectory with water, the oil crisis will seem like the trailer of some horrible disaster movie.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.

One of the problems with industrialism is that it's based on the premise of more and more. It has to keep expanding to keep going. More and more television sets. More and more cars. More and more steel, and more and more pollution. We don't question whether we need any more or what we'll do with them. We just have to keep on making more and more if we are to keep going. Sooner or later it's going to collapse. ... Look what we have done already with the principle of more and more when it comes to nuclear weapons.

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.