Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

It does not matter whether we burn fossil fuels with malice or with love. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it is not concerned. It is a collection of gases.

Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.