Lester R. Brown Quotes

24 quotes in 531 categories

• We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems, a global community where the basic needs of all the Earth's people…
• In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air…
• Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.
• The 20th century was the time when the world turned to use of fossil fuels and the 21st century will be the century of the…
• The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.
• Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of…
• In the Middle East, where populations are growing fast, the world is seeing the first collision between population growth and water supply at the regional…
• We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity…
• Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases…
• In today's integrated world economy, ... eradicating poverty may contribute as much to U.S. security as eradicating terrorism.
• Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a…
• One way or another, the choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come
• The choice is ours-yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over a global bubble economy that keeps expanding until it…
• The challenge is either to build an economy that is sustainable or to stay with our unsustainable economy until it declines. It is not a…
• Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.
• If an economy is to sustain progress, it must satisfy the basic principles of ecology. If it does not, it will decline and eventually collapse.…
• Today, more than ever, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support…
• Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
• Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.
• In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the…

Browse Lester R. Brown Quotes by Category