"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined minerals, pumped oil, and flattened mountains for their buried coal. And we did these things in a way that was not remotely sustainable. By harvesting renewable resources faster than they could regrow, by using non-renewable resources that could not be recycled, and by choking environments with industrial wastes, we were borrowing from future generations and from other species."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Richard Heinberg, "Ted Nordhaus Is Wrong: We Are Exceeding Earth’s Carrying Capacity." Undark (July 26, 2018)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Environmental_degradation
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Environmental degradation
19 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Environmental degradation →
Related Quotes
"All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and…"
"Environmental and are at root social crises. They are caused by profound problems in the social world, by elites, and…"
"The growth and progress upon which we looked back with such pride had committed mankind to living on a scale that exc…"
"Our way of walking on the Earth has a great influence on animals and plants. We have killed so many animals and plant…"
"In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene…. Pollution …"
"Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, deplet…"
"We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it.…"
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the…"
"The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjo…"
"The human predicament was exceptional in that, empowered by a planetary larder of fossil fuels, they developed a glob…"