Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything goes with it.

Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

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

Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.