Natural Resource Depletion Quotes

The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.

One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades. Concurrently, the amount of rainfall has declined to the point where the country is rapidly becoming a wasteland.

Oh, I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. And why? Because men are too lazy and stupid to stoop down and pick up their fuel from the ground.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

GDP tells you nothing about sustainability

Obviously, my perception of the world is one where humans are a threat to our survival.

To survive, humans need food, water, and air. Yet biodiversity, the Earth's bodies of water, and the planet's atmosphere are all under threat.

Economic growth which strips out the planet’s ecosystems is not sustainable

Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

The fate of the living planet is the most important issue facing mankind.

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home - Earth - is in grave danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone

We are letting the extractive energy industries turn the world inside out.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.

With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.

The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.

One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods - it's a vicious cycle.

Nature's message is clear: we can't keep doing what we're doing now.

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

Unrestrained greed means the ruin of the great woods and the drying up of the sources of the rivers.