Donald Wuerl Quotes

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.

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

We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.

We need to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children.

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.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

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

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

Thanks to my effort in the last 40 years, there has been more paper and film wasted.

I only started to understand the concept of "environmental protection" 14 years ago. I was an ambassador for a charity event, and the staff told me that the consumption of disposable chopsticks in China, per year, could result in the devastation of unimaginable acres of forest.

The most serious problem facing humankind is climate change.

I have been fighting climate change and working to improve our environment.

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

My main issue is sustainability of the Earth, and protection of those animals and people who dwell here.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

The planet will adapt to anything. Maybe we should start to use the heart and the brain that we've been given to organize ourselves. Because if we keep screwing up things, we may be just passing by in the history of the planet.

We live in a disposable society. We throw so much away. But it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the planet and it comes from future generations' lives.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

It's no secret - if you know me, have ever met me or have shared a meal with me - that I'm a passionate environmentalist.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

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

I believe the American people care a lot about the environment.

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