A Quote by William E. Rees

We do not have an ecological crisis. The ecosphere has a human crisis. Our 'story' about our place in the scheme of things has somehow gone awry in the industrial age.

William E. Rees

Quote Topics

About Age Awry Crisis Ecological Ecological Crisis Gone Human Industrial Our Place Scheme Somehow Story Things

Quote Author

William E. Rees
British - Professor
Born: December 18, 1943

We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Charles Eisenstein

The crisis of the church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority, or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.

James K. Baxter

There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected.

Jean-Francois Cope

We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that are now threatening human life and much of the rest of life on earth. Our crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of decision of policy and action.

George Wald

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Rowan Williams

People look at the future and see a black hole. They look at climate change and see an ecological crisis. They look at their leaders corrupted by money and see a political crisis. They wonder if they'll ever be able to pay off their student loan or own a house. Given this ecological, political and financial crisis, what they want is a different future. Their fundamental demand is a different regime to provide that future.

Kalle Lasn

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

Jean Houston

... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.

Wendell Berry

There is no doubt that many expensive national projects may add to our prestige or serve science. But none of them must take precedence over human needs. As long as Congress does not revise its priorities, our crisis is not just material, it is a crisis of the spirit.

Nelson Rockefeller

For far too many, the housing crisis has become a human crisis, with people being criminalised who should instead be protected as our most vulnerable citizens.

Layla Moran

For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis.

Greta Thunburg

And just as the false assumption that we are not connected to the earth has led to the ecological crisis, so to the equally false assumption that we arenot connected to each other that has led to our social crisis.

Al Gore

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

Rene Dubos

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.