Alex Steffen Quotes

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

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.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

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.

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

The worst environmental decision you can make as a human being is to have 14 kids.

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

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime 'threats without enemies' that confront us.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

We're in a war, the war of industrial civilization against the natural world.

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

Can you name an environmental problem that would NOT be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder (and ultimately impossible) with more? Nobody can.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

The overpopulation of the earth The destruction of our natural habitat The rat race of humanity against itself The disappearance of all strong emotions and passions through pampering Genetic deterioration through deficient selection pressure on development and the lack of preservation of the norms of social behavior The breakdown of tradition; and The increasing susceptibility of humans to indoctrination

If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

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

In a lot of ways, Nauru is something like a canary in a coal mine: It's a tiny place with more than its share of troubles, most of them the kind that might have been prevented.

We recognise the link between environmental failure and social injustice. When the energy sector is privatised and deregulated, it not only tends to pollute more, it also charges the poorest more per unit!

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

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.

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.