E. O. Wilson Quotes

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.

If we invest in researching and developing energy technology, we'll do some real good in the long run, rather than just making ourselves feel good today. But climate change is not the only challenge of the 21st century, and for many other global problems we have low-cost, durable solutions.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

We want to use the environment to shift the way our society works.

In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that's an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

I think today we recognize that economic activity needs to search for ways to protect the environment.

Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century.

Good environmental policy is good economic policy.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

Labor believes in sustainability. We believe in acting on climate change, not just talking about it.

I think politics today is all about false choices: You can have a robust energy economy and a challenged environment, or a great environment and no economy. That's a false choice. You can do both.

I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today.

My role is not to choose between safeguarding the economy and protecting the environment - it's about doing both.

You know, Californians care about protecting their environment. So do I. But they also care about that in the context of a healthy economy.

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

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.

I hardly can sleep. I feel that my target now is really to save Mother Earth for humanity. And it's doable.

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on.

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.

We don't have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.

We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.

Our goal is not just the survival of America. It is the survival of the whole planet.