“No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.”
— Joel Cohen and David Tilman
“Global vegetation has been reduced by about 24% as a result of agriculture”
— Vaclav Smil
“As a driver of global change, humanity has outstripped geology.”
— Jedediah Purdy
“I could have composed a more beautiful chorus and made it more attractive by varying it. But then I would have been a mere musician and ignored Nature.”
— Christoph Willibald Gluck, 1714-1787
“Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made.”
— Jedediah Purdy
“What is a civilization worth if it cannot protect the natural conditions that gave birth to it?
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— Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth
“I hope we aren’t the first species to document our own extinction.”
— Cristiana Pașca Palmer
“The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday.”
— Max Roser, Our World in Data
“The long - term survival of our civilization cannot be assured without setting such limits on the planetary scale .”
— Vaclav Smil, Growth
“We can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of [Earth’s] surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of subsistence.”
— James Madison, Address to the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, Virginia (1818)
“More broadly what does it mean to be human when this means to be part of a global force that changes everything—even the future of an entire planet? What does nature even mean in an age of humans?”
— Erle Ellis
“Journalists, by focusing relentlessly on the dysfunction, feed into people’s sense of fatalism. They begin to think that nothing will ever work.”