 The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years. |
| I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol. |
| Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children. |
| The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction. |
| This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process. |
| The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too. |
| How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally. |
| The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis. |
| What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right? |
| Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land. |
| The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat. |
| There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency. |
| If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job. |
| Markets can't think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace. |
| I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later. |
| I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this. |
| Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded. |
