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Wangari Maathai: Well, I don't only *think* that the biosphere is in trouble. I know it is. I just have to look around...
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Stephen Hawking: One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available.
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Thom Hartmann: Our biosphere is sick.
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David Orr: This is "all hands on deck" time.
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Thomas Linzey: Not only is it the 11th hour, it's 11:59 and 59 seconds.
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Wes Jackson: It's not just global warming. It's not just fossil-fuel dependency. It's not just soil erosion It's not just chemical contamination of our land and water. It's not just the population problem. And it's not just all of those. - The deterioration of the environment of our planet is an outward mirror of an inner condition. - Like inside, like outside. And that's a part of the Great Work.
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[last lines]
Oren Lyons: What if we choose to eradicate ourselves from this Earth, by whatever means? The Earth goes nowhere. And in time, it will regenerate, and all the lakes will be pristine. The rivers, the waters, the mountains, everything will be green again. It'll be peaceful. There may not be people, but the Earth will regenerate. And you know why? - Because the Earth has all the time in the world and we don't. So I think that's where we're at, right now.
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Kenny Ausubel: Probably the greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalization.
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Kenny Ausubel: When we all talk about "saving the environment" in a way it's misstated because the environment is going to survive. We are the ones who may not survive. Or we may survive in a world we don't particularly wanna live in.
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James Hillman: But even to think that we are separated from Nature is somehow a thinking disorder. You cannot be separated from Nature. Why we think that way is the interesting thing.
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Sen. James Inhofe: Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?
Stephen Hawking: One of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming brought about by rising levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The danger is that the temperature increase might become self-sustaining if it has not done so already.
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Nathan Gardels: Understand that things are thieves of time.
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Ray Anderson: So we've got bad things happening on a lot of fronts. And Earth is hurting... and we are the culprit.
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Thom Hartmann: The problem is the way we are thinking. The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem. It's at the level of our culture that this illness is happening.
David Orr: We are now products of $500 billion of advertising each year.
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David Orr: So as we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process. There's no escaping that conclusion.
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David Suzuki - Scientist, Environmentalist, Broadcaster: Economists don't include all of the things that nature does for us for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does. For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in, which all the green things do for us for nothing? It's possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace nature. Well, it turns out,
[one researcher]
David Suzuki - Scientist, Environmentalist, Broadcaster: estimated it would cost us $35 trillion a year to do what nature is doing for us for nothing. Now to put that in perspective. If you had added up all of the annual economies of all the countries in the world at that time, it would come to $18 trillion. So, nature is doing twice as much service for us as the economies of the world. And in the madness of conventional economics, this is not in the equation.
The 11th Hour Quotes
Extended Reading
