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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of consumerism, capitalism, and the economic model. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.”
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
“Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process . . . Capitalism is destroying the earth.”
- Helen Caldicott
“You can't have everything; where would you put it?”
- Steven Wright
“Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.”
- John Clapham
“The message from Wal-Mart today to the rest of the business community is there need not be any conflict between the environment and the economy. We will find the way not only to reconcile (those), but to find new profits and new opportunities as we do the right thing.”
- Al Gore
“Business has to change the way it does business, or we will make no significant changes in the way we relate to the earth.”
- Dennis Weaver
“There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.”
- Herman E. Daly
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
- John Maynard Keynes
“I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor that she cannot afford to keep them.”
- Margaret Murie
“We don't have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.”
- Dennis Weaver
“Why is it that we judge development on what we have built rather than what we have preserved? We strive to protect what was built by man, but give little thought to protecting what was made by God.”
- Juanito G. Cambangay
“The idea that the American model of liberal capitalism offers the widest scope for individual opportunity is the great ideological hoax of our times.”
- David Clark
“Natural ecosystems will only be protected when society taxes the pumping of fresh water, the damming of rivers and the felling of virgin timber. As polluters pay more, and those who tread more lightly on the Earth pay less, incentives are created for people to do the right thing.”
- John Robbins
“It is sometimes argued that advertising really does little harm because no one believes it any more anyway. We consider this view to be erroneous. The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe, and that it teaches (in the words of Leo Marx) ‘the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind: words, images, and ideas.’ The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man.”
- Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
“By now it should be clear that environmental consumerism is not a fad or even a short-term trend. It is a way of life with broad support throughout our society.”
- Jacquelyn A.
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered. A nation can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
- Kenneth E. Boulding
“If you have great wealth, give alms out of your abundance; if you have but little, distribute even some of that. But do not hesitate to give alms.”
- Apocrypha
“In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.”
- Mollie Beattie
“This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.”
- Rutherford B. Hayes
“The throwaway culture is passing and a new culture of sustainability is fast becoming the norm.”
- Gareth Mitchell
“I want to make it clear, if there is ever a conflict (between environmental quality and economic growth), I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape.”
- Jimmy Carter
“Progress from now on has to mean something different.”
- Robert Redford
“We already have too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”
- Paul Ehrlich
“Making capitalism out of socialism is like making eggs out of an omelet.”
- Vadim Bakatin
“Localization means finding a balance that has been lost between local, regional, national and international markets. It does not mean that there is no open trade, but that companies have less control and communities more over what is produced and how. It means that what is traded is done fairly, to mutal advantage.”
- Ed Mayo
“The superior man seeks what is right; the inferior one, what is profitable.”
- Confucius
“War has been good to me from a financial standpoint but I don't want to make money that way. I don't want blood money.”
- Ted Turner
“Capitalism is the earth's number one enemy.”
- Barry Commoner
“We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life.”
- Rashida Bee
“There are some 2 billion people, many living sustainably with traditional livelihoods, who are unlikely to ever have access to banks or dominant money systems. Yet, their mutual aid and barter can be facilitated independently from our dysfunctional money systems, which are about scarcity, competition and fear. Barter and mutual aid are about cooperation, sharing and abundance.”
- Hazel Henderson
“The glory of the human has become the desolation of the earth. This I would consider an appropriate way to summarize the twentieth century.”
- Thomas Berry
Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.”
- Charles Derber
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“We are not against business. We are against business without morality.”
- Champa Devi Shukla
“We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition—that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.”
- Anita Roddick
“Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: 'No man should have so much.' The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: 'All men should have as much.'”
- Phelps H. Adams
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“There is enough for all. The earth is a generous mother; she will provide in plentiful abundance food for all her children if they will but cultivate her soil in justice and in peace.”
- Bourke Coekran
“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself.”
- Swedish Proverb
“Take what you can use and let the rest go by.”
- Ken Kesey
“When the British came they introduced the concept of title deeds for land, which they insisted be in the name of the head of the household. That was always the man. That undermined the traditional setting whereby land belongs to the family. This reform stopped women having legal right to the land. When the cash came in, it went into a bank account held by the man, even though it was women and children who did the work in the fields. Women were completely disenfranchised.”
- Wangari Maathai
“Accordingly, globalization is not only something that will concern and threaten us in the future, but something that is taking place in the present and to which we must first open our eyes.”
- Ulrich Beck
“The gap in our economy is between what we have and what we think we ought to have - and that is a moral problem, not an economic one.”
- Paul Heyne
“China's incredible rate of economic growth and its corresponding increase in energy consumption has made the world supply tight.”
- Mac Thornberry
“What we need is a system of work in which, instead of believing in a job, people can believe in themselves.”
- Ed Mayo
“Since the first Earth Day in 1970 the average family size in the U.S. has dropped by 16 percent, while the average single family house being built has increased by 48 percent. The U.S. conservation community and the media have given scant attention to the ‘ecological transfer effects’ of the mission shift on U.S. public lands. Any ethical or moral foundation for ecological sustainability is weak indeed unless thee is a corresponding focus on the consumption side of the natural resource equation.”
- Doug MacCleery
“We need a number of solutions - we need more efficiency and conservation. Efficiency is a big one. I think car companies need to do a lot better in producing more efficient cars. They have the technology; we just need to demand them as consumers.”
- Daryl Hannah
“Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?”
- Kenneth E. Boulding
“Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.”
- Channing E. Phillips
“We no longer see the world as a single entity. We’ve moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.”
- David Suzuki
“Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks.”
- Frank Murkowski
“When we protect the places where the processes of life can flourish, we strengthen not only the future of medicine, agriculture and industry, but also the essential conditions for peace and prosperity.”
- Harrison Ford
“Savannas are magnificent wildflower gardens. Something is always blooming grass pink orchids, rose pogonia, rosebud orchids, ladies' tresses. In the heat of the summer the fringed orchids are torches through the meadows. Blue-eyed and yellow eyed grass, white eyed sedge. Meadow beauties. Fall brings on the composites, purple spires of liatris, also called blazing star, brown rayless sunflowers, goldenrod, bigelowia and coreopsis. The aster balduina pools like orange juice in the wettest places and clumps of pearl-tipped hatpins stick the carpet of forbs to the flat earth. White violets hover low.”
- Janisse Ray
“We should be able to support our own economy within our own borders.”
- Dennis Weaver
“Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.”
- Sinclair Lewis
“Be glad that you're greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren't.”
- Mignon McLaughlin
“Only when the last tree has been cut down,
Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”
- Cree Indian Proverb
“The premise is simple: One economy and one environment, and they're interdependent.”
- Dennis Weaver
“The world has entered a new era, evolving from an industrial into a knowledge-based society, and into a society that wants to live in harmony with nature.”
- Minoru Mori
“You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.”
- Norman Douglas
“The voluntary approach to corporate social responsibility has failed in many cases.”
- David Suzuki
“Reliable data on the outsourcing of American jobs is sorely missing from the debate on globalization.”
- Dan Lipinski
“Twenty years ago, you might have been pessimistic and said there's no hope. But these days, some of our very biggest companies are acting remarkably cleanly. And in some cases, although not all cases, the CEOs are the driving forces behind that.”
- Jared Diamond
“Renewable energy also creates more jobs than other sources of energy - most of these will be created in the struggling manufacturing sector, which will pioneer the new energy future by investment that allows manufacturers to retool and adopt new technologies and methods.”
- Jay Inslee
“We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin.”
- Leif Johansson
“The proper role of government in capitalist societies is to represent the interests of the future to the present.”
- Lester Thurow
“We are outsourcing all of the United States industrial base to China. That also has national security along with economic implications in the future.”
- Peter DeFazio
“The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.”
- Barry Commoner
“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”
- Ronald Reagan
“History will see advertising "as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.”
- Malcolm Muggeridge
“I'm against this huge globalization on the basis of economic advantage.”
- David Attenborough
“Business must be the solution, not the problem.”
- Dennis Weaver
“Advertising is the principal reason why the business man has come to inherit the earth.”
- James Randolph Adams
“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
- George Santayana
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
- Edward Abbey
“As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor.”
- Barry Commoner
“There is no free market in oil.”
- Peter DeFazio
“Every good cause is worth some inefficiency.”
- Paul Samuelson
“We are monumentally distracted by a pervasive technological culture that appears to have a life of its own, one that insists on our full attention, continually seducing us and pulling us away from the opportunity to experience directly the true meaning of our own lives.”
- Al Gore
“The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.”
- Barry Commoner
“Our task is not to make societies safe for globalization, but to make the global system safe for decent societies.”
- John J. Sweeney
“The immediate source of the ecological crisis is capitalism which is a cancer in the biosphere. I believe the color of radicalism today is not red, but green.”
- Murray Bookchin
“Mass demand has been created almost entirely through the development of advertising.”
- Calvin Coolidge
“Small businesses are the economic drivers of our country, providing the stimulus our communities need.”
- Melissa Bean
“Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support.”
- Paul Samuelson
“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.”
- Ronald Reagan
“In today's integrated world economy, eradicating poverty may contribute as much to U.S. security as eradicating terrorism.”
- Lester R. Brown
“Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, and running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.”
- Edward Abbey
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them.”
- Michael Oppenheimer
“Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“There are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all. And it's no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere.”
- Al Gore
“The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.”
- Kin Hubbard
“The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.”
- Barry Commoner
“It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods.”
- John Michael Greer
“What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.”
- Barry Commoner
“If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”
- Chinese Proverb
“If we are going to carry on growing, and we will, because no country is going to forfeit its right to economic growth, we have to find a way of doing it sustainably.”
- Tony Blair
“I submit that a nation which cannot afford to protect its endangered species has already overreached itself biologically.”
- Thomas E Lovejoy
“We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property.... Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops.”
- Paul Brooks
“Young people are "threatened . . . by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.”
- Pope John Paul II
“AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.”
- Jared Diamond
“We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“Affluence creates poverty.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“And you cannot tackle hunger, disease, and poverty unless you can also provide people with a healthy ecosystem in which their economies can grow.”
- Gro H. Brundtland
“Having yet another vote on refinery legislation that uses high oil prices as an excuse to weaken environmental protections and to give more legislative gifts to the oil industry is misguided in the extreme.”
- Sherwood Boehlert
“We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“Each Valentine's Day, when US and other consumers purchase millions of flowers for their loved ones and deeply inhale the fresh aroma of roses and carnations, they rarely think about where the flowers come from or how they are produced. Yet, if these same people knew more about the high levels of agrochemicals used in flower production and the often less-than-rosy labor conditions under which flowers are produced, they might think twice about sinking their noses into the petals to smell the perfume.”
- Environmental Health Perspectives
“You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy”
- Eric Hoffer
“In its timing and in the composition of the principal actors, Bhopal is a curtain raiser to the sordid drama of Globalisation. Bhopal is a window to what lies at the end of Globalisation.”
- Satinath Sarangi
“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
- Stephen Leacock
“The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right.”
- Donella Meadows
“If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures – not on short-term exploitation – but on long-term, sustainable development.”
- Gaylord Nelson
“The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.”
- Mikhail Gorbachev
“Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.”
- Michael Pollan
“By employing the intelligence of natural systems we can create industry, buildings, even regional plans that see nature and commerce not as mutually exclusive but mutually coexisting.”
- Brad Pitt
“Beware and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does life consist of his possessions. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
- God; Luke 12:15,23,34
“The Environmentalist's Dream is an Egalitarian Society based on: rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
- Aaron Wildavsky
“Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.”
- Stewart Udall
“By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.”
- Ellen Willis
“I have never believed we had to choose between either a clean and safe environment or a growing economy. Protecting the health and safety of all Americans doesn’t have to come at the expense of our economy’s bottom line. And creating thriving companies and new jobs doesn’t have to come at the expense of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the natural landscape in which we live. We can, and indeed must, have both.”
- Bill Clinton
“The world is richer than ever, and the gaps between rich and poor are wider.”
- Anna Lindh
“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.”
- John Kenneth Galbraith
“I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecological society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism.”
- Judi Barri
“Unpaid work (parenting, growing food for family and community needs, maintaining households, volunteering in community service, do-it-yourself home and community construction, and repair projects) is estimated as some 50 % of all production in OECD countries and 60 to 65 percent in developing countries.”
- Hazel Henderson
“I think the hardest thing about my job is the way Whole Foods Market views itself philosophically is that we are a business dedicated to meeting all the various stakeholders of the company's best interests. And by stakeholders we mean customers, team members, stockholders, community, and the environment. Sometimes what is in the best interest of one stakeholder may not be in the best interest of another stakeholder, and as the CEO, I have to balance the various interests of the different constituencies and stakeholders to create win, win, win scenarios, and that can sometimes be very difficult to do. Everybody wants something from the CEO.”
- John Mackey
“Extremists claim that we humans are a cancer on the earth. By contrast, forest ecology teaches that we are all part of nature and all life forms change through time. It strikes a balance between human and non-human interests, between reason and emotion. We cannot deny that we must consume to survive any more than we can deny that over-consumption would lead to our demise.”
- Patrick Moore
“When we realize we can make a buck cleaning up the environment, it will be done!”
- Dennis Weaver
“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”
- Ronald Reagan
“We find that advertising works the way the grass grows. You can never see it, but every week you have to mow the lawn.”
- Andy Tarshis
“Advertising degrades the people it appeals to; it deprives them of their will to choose.”
- C. P. Snow
“We spend more on cows than the poor.”
- Gordon Brown
“We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.”
- Jane Goodall
“The closer we get to a virtuous circle, in which our work, our home life, our ethics and our spirituality are mutually reinforcing, the closer we will be to achieving genuine sustainability.”
- James Wilsdon
“I've developed a huge regard for Toyota for its environmental awareness, for its immense commitment to research and development in this field, and for its leadership in developing hybrids which others are now following.”
- Maurice Strong
“For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer poverty.”
- Lyndon B. Johnson
“You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.”
- Vernon Howard
“Money is a poor man's credit card.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.”
- Barry Commoner
“This is the way that people are educated about issues nowadays. This is the main avenue for learning in today’s world.” I would just hope that enough people go to see them, so the studios will be encouraged to make more films like that in the future and that there is an audience for them and they are profitable.”
- Leonardo DiCaprio
“Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV? ”
- Ellen Willis
“Business is recognizing the role it can play in combating climate change. Thank God, is all I can say, for there is a desperately urgent need for business to play that role. Your lobbying influence can be substantial, but together, united and in large enough numbers it could prove decisive in turning the tide.”
- Prince Charles
“Advertising is legalized lying.”
- H.G. Wells
“Poverty does not make people terrorists, but terrorists can exploit the frustration it creates and use it as a breeding-ground for violent ideas.”
- Anna Lindh
“Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.”
- David Suzuki
“Advertising is the whip which hustles humanity up the road to the Better Mousetrap. It is the vision which reproaches man for the paucity of his desires.”
- E.S Turner
“It used to be that scientists studied nature as a way of looking into the mind of God. Now it isn't like that. Most science these days is being financed by corporations or political interests seeking specific results.”
- William Fender
“Pollution should never be the price of prosperity.”
- Al Gore
“An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.”
- Gro H. Brundtland
“We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.”
- Christopher Dodd
“Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”
- Ted Turner
“The fact of the matter is that today, stuff-selling mega-corporations have a huge influence on our daily lives. And because of the competitive nature of our global economy, these corporations are generally only concerned with one thing.. the bottom line. That is, maximizing profit, regardless of the social or environmental costs.”
- David Suzuki
“Even though cars get worse gas mileage than two decades ago, they actually have become much more efficient. The problem is that the efficiency went into more power and larger, heavier vehicles, not into fuel economy. If all of the technological efficiency improvements had gone into efficiency, miles per gallon would be significantly higher than they are today.”
- Neal Elliott
“Today we have a temporary aberration called “industrial capitalism” which is inadvertently liquidating its two most important sources of capital.. the natural world and properly functioning societies. No sensible capitalist would do that.”
- Amory Lovins
“Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in ways that preserve forest structure.”
- Jared Diamond
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
- John F. Kennedy
“The Appalachian Mountains - the birthplace of American democracy, the landscapes where Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone roamed, the source of our values, our virtues, and our character as a people - are being cut to the ground so somebody can make money.”
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.