The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.

The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself.

It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.

It is not an investment if it destroys the planet