As with oil, water exploitation raises an inter-generational debt that will be hard to repay.
It seems an easy choice - sacrifice the tree for a human life - until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. Suddenly we must confront some tough questions. How important are the medical needs of future generations?
I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it, if it creates radiation.
The few pounds we spend for an item of clothing isn't the true cost - the real cost is the millions of gallons of clean water that was used to grow the fabric, or the millions of gallons of fresh water that was polluted with toxic chemicals to dye the clothes.
Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
Conservation is not without a cost.
Everyone realizes that we have to clean up the environment, but no one likes the cost.
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.
Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.
If your child gets asthma, the fossil fuel industry doesn't pay. Or if there's a natural disaster, the bill is paid by the taxpayer, not the fossil fuel company.
Global warming could be solved by shifting three to four per cent of global GDP to pay for it.
In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.
Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate. What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?
The first treasure California began to surrender after the Gold Rush as the oldest: her land.
If we are really serious about protecting the environment, the discharge pipes and stacks of industry would all plug directly into their intake side, and costs would not be externalized to a voiceless environment.
Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100.
Clean air and clean ocean, you can't translate that into money if you look at the cost to health, cost to fishery industry.
In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.
Nothing is costed properly and it's destroying the earth. We need to re-educate people that what is good for the planet is good for the financial system.
Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.
The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.
The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.
The heart of our relationship, this natural environment that has blessed us really all along the west coast of North America, on both sides of the border we've realized that this incredible natural wealth comes with a price.
If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature
Mother Nature does not do bailouts.
