Natural Resources Quotes

“..the planet is just too small for these developing countries to repeat the economic growth in the same way that the rich countries have done it in the past. We don't have enough natural resources, we don't have enough atmosphere. Clearly, something has to change.”
― Mario Molina

“Plastic should be a high value material... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it--I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley)”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

“The natural resources of the world do not belong to any person, organization, collective, or so-called nation.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on
extinction-not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion-until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“The true wealth of a nation is not their natural resources but their achievements in education.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.”
― Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2

“Because of human pollution and overpopulation, the birth of a human being, like the death of a tree, is, to planet earth, a tragedy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation—immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutional guarantees would be the practical basis for democracy. Subsequently, political institutions were shaped in such a way that they could facilitate the disposition of the public domain. But that expectation, as later generations ruefully observed, did not materialize. The combination of economics and government had instead produced a handful of owners and policy makers who were beyond the control of the ballot box.”
― Elmo Richardson, Dams, parks & politics;: Resource development & preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower era

“Every man ought to plant a tree.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“We are coming to recognize as never before the right of the nation to guard its own future in the essential matter of natural resources. In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit. In fact, there has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people, we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt's Writings: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt

“War is to some people the solution to peace.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Seit Jahr und Tag ist notorisch, daß unsere Erde das vorausberechenbare Wachstum der Bevölkerung, die Erschöpfung der natürlichen Ressourcen und die Auszehrung der Umwelt nicht lange erträgt. Wir leben seit geraumer Zeit auf Kosten kommender Generationen. [...] Die Gefahr, daß die Menschheit sich selbst zerstört, ist auch dann nicht gebannt, wenn der Atomkrieg ausbleibt."

("It has been an obvious fact for the longest time that our earth will not be able to sustain for long the foreseeable growth of its population, the exhaustion of its natural resources, and the emaciation of its natural environment. We have been living for quite a while at the expense of our future generations. [...] The absence of a nuclear war does not, by itself, diminish the danger of humanity's self-destruction.")”
― Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen

“The earth had granted me a lifeline, by letting me siphon off some of the water that was on its way somewhere else. Because of me, there would be less water flowing into the Chattahoochee River: less for the speckled trout, less for the wood ducks, less for the mountain laurel that drop their white petals into the river every fall. There would be more water flowing into my septic tank, laced with laundry detergent, dish soap, and human waste. At that moment of high awareness, I promised the land that I would go easy on the water. I would remember where it came from. I would remain grateful for the sacrifice.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

“James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.”
― Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

“The efficient management of organizations is key to generating wealth, for the development of a country, for the preservation of natural resources and the enhancement of the human being.”
― Vinicius Montgomery

“Nous consommons ressources naturelles, énergie et matières premières comme si elles étaient des biens gratuits. Vous pourrez constater à la lecture de cette brochure que tel n’est pas le cas. Dans notre alimentation, notre habitation, nos moyens de transports, nos loisirs, bref dans notre vie de tous les jours, nos gestes de consommation peuvent aider à protéger, conserver ou améliorer notre environnement. Par nos gestes quotidiens, nous pouvons bâtir notre milieu de vie.
La protection de l’environnement n’exclut pas le progrès. Mais le progrès ne doit pas aller à l’encontre de la qualité de l’environnement. C’est un équilibre que je vous invite à respecter.”
― Marcel Léger, L'environnement consommé à crédit

“The wealth of time is actually of more value than natural resources.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“When governments talk of truth and reconciliation, and then push unwanted infrastructure projects, please remember this: There can be no truth unless we admit to the 'why' behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.

Only when we have the courage to tell the truth about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“Developing sound policies requires seeing natural resources as dividends of sustained ecosystem productivity rather than as a stockpile of assets.”
― Daniel C Esty, A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future

“The true value of a country is determined not by what it builds with rich underground resources such as oil and natural gas, but by what it builds with hard work and intelligence without having such underground resources!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Life is one of the most squandered of all our natural resources.”
― Jeff Nania

“Conservation is a state of harmony between people and natural resources.”
― T.J. Burr

“most human endeavours, unless checked by public dissent, evolve into monocultures. money seeks out a region’s comparative advantage, the field in which it competes most successfully, and promotes it to the exclusion of all else. every landscape or seascape, if this process is loosed, performs just one function. this greatly taxes the natural world”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“Since the early seventeenth century we’ve been fervently digging up this buried ancient carbon that cook tens of millions of years for the Earth to slowly stockpile, and we burned a great deal of it in just a few centuries. While there are concerns over peak oil and the diminishing supply of crude, there is plenty of accessible coal still underground – certainly another few centuries’ worth at current consumption rates. In this sense, then, we’re not currently facing another energy crisis but a climate crisis, born as a result of our past solution to our energy hunger.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“The carbon dioxide released by the combustion of fossil fuels has been rapidly increasing its level in the atmosphere, which is now 45 per cent higher that prior to the Industrial Revolution.”
― Lewis Dartnell, Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

“The wealth in this world are like green fruits hidden among green leaves. It stares everyone in the face, yet nobody sees it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“If you were looking for whom to make a hero, look in the direction where there are farmers, for they are the ones who have conspired with nature to save humanity.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain