People aren't satisfied, only they don't seem to know why they're not. The only chance of satisfaction we can imagine is getting more of what we've got now. But it's what we've got now that makes everybody dissatisfied. So what will more of it do - make us more satisfied, or more dissatisfied?- Anonymous British Pensioner (1978)
In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.- John C. Sawhill, President, The Nature Conservancy
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.-Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Senator
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.- Native American proverb
One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to that challenge will be a cause for pride of for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today. If we now begin our work in an appropriate manner, and if we continue to devote a considerable amount of attention and energy to this problem, then mankind will be able to surmount this challenge as it has surmounted so many during the long march of civilization.- Richard Nixon (1969)
In 1972, the Club of Rome (COR) shocked the world with a study titled "The Limits To Growth". Two main conclusions were reached by this study. The first suggests that if economic-development-as-we-know-it continues, society will run out of nonrenewable resources before the year 2072 with the most probable result being a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. The second conclusion of the study is that piecemeal approaches to solving individual problems will not be successful. For example, the COR authors arbitrarily double their estimates of the resource base and allow their model to project a new scenario based on this new higher level of resources. Collapse occurs in the new scenario because of pollution instead of resource depletion. The bottom line is traditional forms of economic development will end in less than 100 years one way or another.
- Jay Hanson (1999)
"Production for production's sake" - production as an end in itself - does indeed come on the scene with the formal subsumption of labour under capital. It makes its appearance as soon as the immediate purpose of production is to produce as much surplus-value as possible.... It is a form of production not bound to a level of needs laid down in advance, and hence it does not predetermine the course of production itself.... This is one side, in contrast to the former mode of production; if you like, it is the positive side. On the other hand, there is the negative side, its contradictory character: production in contradiction, and indifference, to the producer. The real producer as a mere means of production, material wealth as an end in itself. And so the growth of this material wealth is brought about in contradiction to and at the expense of the individual human being. Productivity of labour in general = the maximum of profit with the minimum of work, hence, too, goods constantly become cheaper. This becomes a law, independent of the will of the individual capitalist. And this law only becomes reality because instead of the scale of production being controlled by existing needs, the quantity of products made is determined by the constantly increasing scale of production dictated by the mode of production itself. Its aim is that the individual product should contain as much unpaid labour as possible, and this is achieved only by producing for the sake of production.- Karl Marx (1867)
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.- Kenneth Boulding, economist
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.- Edward Abbey (1985)
Some environmental groups have done their cause a great disservice by painting industrialists, mining company bosses or South American ranchers as evil men, motivated mainly by greed. Most are not, and blaming them falsely only diverts our attention from the real enemy. Very few people are genuinely evil - far too few to bring about all the harm that gets done. People in business, however, are not like us; they are us, sharing all our values and aspirations. It is the capitalist system that forces us all to act as we do.- Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion (1992)
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.-Margaret Mead, anthropologist
To avert disaster, we have to not only teach men to make things, but to teach them to have complete moral control over the things they make.- Charles, The Prince of Wales (1985)
Serious men are ruining our world.- Charlie King, folksinger
I believe that spiritual resistance - the ability to stand firm at the center of our convictions when everything around us asks us to concede - that our capacity to face the harsh measures of life, comes from the deep quiet of listening to the land, the river, the rocks. There is a resonance of humility that has evolved with the Earth.- Terry Tempest Williams
Now the Lord made the world in just six days,
A wonder to behold when it was done,
Deep oceans and blue skies, forest green and mountains high,
With animals that crawl and fly and run.
But one of God's creatures wasn't pleased;
It wanted to create with its own hand;
So it clearcut all the trees, carved the mountains,
Spoiled the seas, proclaiming it the way that God had planned.- Darryl Cherney (1996)
No one can deny that terrorism is today a dangerous and ethically indefensible phenomenon, which should be eradicated regardless of its deep origins, the economic and political factors that brought it to life and those responsible for it.
However, the tragedy should not be used to recklessly start a war that could actually unleash an endless carnage of innocent people and all of this on behalf of justice and under the peculiar and bizarre name of "Infinite Justice".
The first victims of whatever military actions are undertaken will be the billions of people living in the poor and underdeveloped world with their unbelievable economic and social problems, their unpayable debts and the ruinous prices of their basic commodities, their growing natural and ecological catastrophes, their hunger and misery, the massive undernourishment of their children, teenagers and adults, their terrible AIDS epidemic, their malaria, their tuberculosis, and their infectious diseases that threaten whole nations with extermination.
The grave economic world crisis was already a real and irrefutable fact affecting absolutely every one of the big economic power centers. Such crises will inevitably grow deeper under the new circumstances and when it becomes unbearable for the overwhelming majority of the peoples, it will bring chaos, rebellion, and the impossibility to govern.
- Fidel Castro (2001)
The task of each family is the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.- Margaret Mead
Anyone who writes...however gloomy [his] message may be, is necessarily an optimist. If the pessimists really believed what they were saying, there would be no point in saying it.- Joan Robinson
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstances.- Bruce Barton
The fact is that what's happening in India today is not a "problem", and the issues that some of us are raising are not "causes". They are huge political and social upheavals that are convulsing the nation. One is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being.- Arundhati Roy (2002)
I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward. The example of great and fine personalities is the only thing that can lead us to fine ideas and noble deeds. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi with the money bags of Carnegie?- Albert Einstein, The World As I See It (1934)
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the environment. Unreasonable people adapt the environment to themselves. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people.- George Bernard Shaw
In every form of media today - television, newspapers, Internet, radio - we Americans are hearing the call to fulfill our patriotic duty to shop. Although our wars in the past have demanded that we tighten our belts, that some measure of national sacrifice and frugality are necessary, this time the war is different. Multinational corporations are presently all too capable of churning out the tools of war, but not without a continuing and escalating injection of "consumer confidence." The ideology of perpetual growth and progress has boiled over, requiring a bigger cauldron each time we turn up the heat. Only now, there seems to be a hole in our cauldron, as the invisible hand shrinks away from the scalding mess that is spilling out and threatening to quell our economic fire.- Jennifer Chesworth, Earth First! (Nov.-Dec. 2001)
Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee.- Job 12:8
We are gobbling the seed stock of life and pretending that the free lunch can go on forever. The biosphere in which our species evolved has served to sustain us quite well for millennia. Yet those who seek to stop the brutal assault on our shared home are condemned as radicals by men whose self-proclaimed conservatism is really nothing more than a demand to be allowed to enrich themselves at any cost.- Marc Davis, Earth First! (Nov.-Dec. 2001)
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