The industrial economy is based on systematic theft from land bases, and the conversion of these living communities into dead products. That’s what an industrial economy is. The economy does not create value for the real world: It destroys the real world.

I am not the first to make the case-as I have in my other work-that the industrial economy, indeed, civilization (which underpins and gives inevitable rise to it), is incompatible with human and nonhuman freedoms, and in fact with human and nonhuman life. If you accept that the industrial economy-and beneath it, civilization-is destroying the planet and creating unprecedented human suffering among the poor (and if you don't accept this, go ahead and put this book down, back away slowly, turn on the television, and take some more soma: the drug should kick in soon enough, your agitation will disappear, you'll forget everything I've said, and then everything will be perfect again, just like the voices from the television tell you over and over), then it becomes clear that the best thing that can happen, from the perspective of essentially all nonhumans as well as the vast majority of humans, is for the industrial economy (and civilization) to go away, or in the shorter run for it to be slowed as much as humanly possible during the time we await its final collapse.

Today, local economies are being destroyed by the "pluralistic," displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.

The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings

The free enterprise policies that produce solely for waste and for profit and that promote a consumerist mentality rather than one of need are damaging to the environment. I am in no sense defending the centralised economies of eastern Europe. They have polluted the north sea and rivers just as industries in Britain and North America have destroyed rivers, wasted natural resources and ruined people's lives by their form of pollution. It is not good enough to promote an economic system that produces for waste and to promote environmental controls in western Europe and North America to look after our environment if at the same time we transfer that destruction of the environment to poorer Third-world countries, either by exporting toxic waste and letting those countries get rid of it by whatever means they can, because they are desperate for foreign currency, or by promoting the destruction of the rain forests, through raping those countries to collect debt payments, when they can make them only by destroying all their natural resources. We live in an age when we have an opportunity to improve our environment and save ourselves from mass destruction through climatic change and environmental disasters.

Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.

The relationship between Man and his environment, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has been an exploitative and predatory one. Until the early seventies, little or nothing was done. In the absence of global accountability, greatly accelerated economic activities as well as population pressures combined to erode the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem, to destroy natural resources and habitats, and bring about widespread pollution of air and water as well as the degradation of the soil.

Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked. Many people will deny doing anything wrong because distractions constantly dull our consciousness of just how limited and finite our world really is.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

The “global economy” is another name for imperialism, and imperialism is a transnational form of capitalism. The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead, gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, televi­sion, and armed force.

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction, and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.

I do believe ... that human population pressure--the sheer number of people on this planet--is the single most important cause of the degradation of the natural environment, of the progressive extinction of wild species of plants and animals, and of the destabilization of the world's climatic and atmospheric systems.
The simple fact is that the human population of the world is consuming natural renewable resources faster than it can regenerate, and the process of exploitation is causing even further damage. If this is already happening with a population of 4 billion, I ask you to imagine what things will be like when the population reaches six and then 10 billion.... All this has been made possible by the industrial revolution and the scientific explosion and it is spread around the world by the new economic religion of development.

The entropic mess that our economy has become is the final blowoff of… industrialism. The destructive practices known as "free-market globalism" were engendered by our run-up to and arrival at the world oil production peak. It was the logical climax of the oil "story." It required the breakdown of all previous constraints… to maximize the present at the expense of the future and to do so for the benefit of a very few at the expense of the many. […] Free-market globalism became the reigning orthodoxy […], challenged only by cranks… at the very margins of society. The moment that the world recognizes the passing of the oil production peak as a reality, globalism will be dead both in theory and practice.

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.