Planetary Boundaries Quotes

Humanity is not forever chained to this planet.

Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.

Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence.

I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It's fragile. That may not be obvious to a lot of folks, and it's tough that people are fighting each other here on Earth instead of trying to get together and live on this planet. We look pretty vulnerable in the darkness of space.

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.

We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

I don't totally buy or believe the paradigm that's constantly presented to us and the financial news is obsessed with, which is growth. There seems to be this paradigm which is: There has to be growth. I'm watching it and thinking, am I the only one who recognises this is a small planet isolated in a gigantic universe? Where are we growing to?

We see an entire planet which has many limitations.

The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.

Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level - environmentally, economically, culturally - is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.

We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings - within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.

There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.

The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet.