If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

We need a more authoritative world...What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.