Janine Benyus Quotes

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.

Nature conserves, prefers novelty.

We must not risk defunding environmental conservation programs, which is why Congress should reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund to preserve our natural resources.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

We have reached a new milestone as a human family. With seven billion of us now inhabiting our planet, it is time to ask some fundamental questions. How can we provide a dignified life for ourselves and future generations while preserving and protecting the global commons - the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems that support us?

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

World-wide practice of Conservation and the fair and continued access by all nations to the resources they need are the two indispensable foundations of continuous plenty and of permanent peace.

We don't need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits - not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon.

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

Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Governments at all levels and the whole society should act more vigorously to protect the land our lives depend on.

Environmental activism against the resource industry is widespread all over the world, but at the same time we have to realise that these are basic materials on which civilisation depends. We need to tap natural resources in a sustainable manner.

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.

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

We can survive as a population only if we conserve, develop sustainably, and protect the world's resources.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?

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.

I, Maggie, personally cannot tell you that you're going to save the planet. But what I do know is that we can draw a line to an issue that can conserve what we already have and what's left in a way that we can actually breathe the air, drink the water, actually grow things in soil - that matters in a real, practical way.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

Conservation of energy also protects our environment.