Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Jeremy Rifkin

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled 'genetically engineered', the public will shy away and won't take them.

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.

Here we are 17 years later. Those agencies never did come through.

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

The insurance companies aren't covering that. Should Monsanto be liable for these losses? Should the state government? Who's going to cover the losses? The fact is, here's an industry with no long-term liability in place.

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.

The antitrust litigation currently in the federal courts in the U.S. against Monsanto will be the test case in the life sciences, just as the Microsoft case was the test case in the information sciences.

The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.

Back in the mid-1980s, congressional hearings were held after we brought this litigation, and held up the first experiment. At that time, I went in front of Congress, along with the major agencies involved with this.

Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.

Many of the mainstream agricultural scientists, especially at the agricultural schools, but at all of our major universities, are tied into all sorts of contractual relationships and consulting relationships with the life science companies.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.

Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can spray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn because it's producing a gene that makes it tolerant of the herbicide.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.

Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

What type of new economical system can organize this system? There is another sector in our life, that we rely on every single day, that are absolutely essential: the social commons, the social economy. It is all the activity we engage in to create social capital. It doesn't create capital market. Social commons is growing faster than the market place. It is growing faster than the market place. The social commons include any activity that is deeply social and collaborative.

The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.

The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.

Now in Wikipedia it's really interesting. If you put something incorrect up on Wikipedia within minutes there are people crawling all over that sentence saying, "This is wrong" or "I want to change this" or "You've got to include an amplification," et cetera. So there's this massive checks and balances that actually makes that accuracy work. This is the kind of model that we - and I'm not sure why no one's discussing this - that we now have to begin to apply to fake news.

Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.

The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.

Starvation does not occur because of a world food shortage. If everyone ate a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet there would be enough food for everyone. The only sane way forward is to grow food for humans rather than to feed it to farmed animals.

It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.

We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.

James Watt patented his steam engine on the eve of the American Revolution, consummating a relationship between coal and the new Promethean spirit of the age, and humanity made its first tentative steps into an industrial way of life that would, over the next two centuries, forever change the world.

Economic activity is no longer an adversarial contest between embattled sellers and buyers "In the distributed economy, where collaboration trumps competition, inclusivity replaces exclusivity and transparency and openness to others becomes essential to the new way of conducting business, empathic sensibility has room to breathe and thrive. It is no longer so constrained by hierarchies, boundaries of exclusion, and a concept of human nature that places acquisitiveness, self-interest, and utility at the center of the human experience."

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world.

The world's environment can no longer handle beef.

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.

I think capitalism will not disappear, but it's going to increasingly not be the exclusive arbiter of economic life. It's going to have to find value in interacting with the sharing economy on many levels. And this hybrid system that's already emerging among millennials is going to be a mature system where, by midcentury, part of the day will be in the capitalist market, part of the day in the sharing economy, depending on your marginal costs.

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.

We need a change in consciousness to go with this technology platform. We need a new narrative: we need to shift from geopolitics to biosphere consciousness in one generation. The biosphere is understood here as what goes from the biosphere to the depths of the ocean 40 miles where all living beings interact with all chemicals to create a very complex choreography that we call "life on earth". That is biosphere that is our indivisible community.

The modern age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix. The earthly rhythms that characterize a more pastoral way of life have been shunted aside to make room for the fast track of an urbanized existence. Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.

Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.

t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.

Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.

It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.

We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.