Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.

Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

Everything is connected to everything else.

What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.

The favorite statistic is that the U.S. contains 6 to 7% of the world population but consumes more than half the world's resources and is responsible for that fraction of the total environmental pollution. But this statistic hides another vital fact: that not everyone in the U.S. is so affluent.