Edward Burtynsky Quotes

No nation has ever aggressively and intensely exploited national resources over such a great area as has the United States.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

For a Canadian, natural resources were a good fit.

Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission.

Important reserves of natural resources, like petroleum and precious metals, are the bulwarks for laying the foundations for the future.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

We nor our bailiffs will take another man’s wood for Our castles or any other purpose without the owner’s consent.

The oil companies don’t own the resources…. We own the resources.

Human use of one resource runs squarely against human use of another resource.

In our ephemeral information age, people think we've left behind the stone, bronze, and iron ages. But they're all still going on - we use tonnes of this stuff every day. You just have to look.

What I said when Otter Creek came up is that we in Montana have a history of giving away our resources. We need to make sure Montana is getting its share.

Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

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.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

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.

The good Lord put oil and gas there for us to find and use, and we'd better do it.

The term 'natural resources' confuses people. 'Natural resources' are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.

We've got to take care of the resources we have on this planet, because there's no resupply possible.

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

There must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain.