Environmental Debt Quotes

Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head.

We really owe a great deal to the rubber tree.

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.

We owe at least this much to future generations, from whom we have borrowed a fragile planet called Earth.

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

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

Either we leave our descendants an endowment of zero poverty, zero fossil-fuel use, and zero biodiversity loss, or we leave them facing a tax bill from Earth that could wipe them out.

I can't tell the people of India that we'll burden you with high costs because the West has polluted the world, now India will pay for it. Not acceptable to us.