"If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature."
"Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error. Unlike other creatures we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes."
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Source: Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.3, Canongate Books
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"Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
"the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine."
"Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet."
"Like most problems with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The biosphere might have been able to tolerate our dirty old friends coal and oil if we burned them gradually, but how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so frenzied that the dark size of this planet glows like a fanned ember in the night of space."
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