Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out — or break your hearts. Let us save at least half of our lives for the enjoyment of this wonderful world which still exists. Leave your dens, abandon your cars and walk out into the great mountains, the deserts, the forests, the seashores. Those treasures still belong to all of us. Enjoy them to the full, stretch your legs, expand your lungs, enliven your hearts — and we will outlive the greedy swine who want to destroy it all in the name of what they call GROWTH.
God bless America — let's save some of it.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!

Any environmental biologist or statistician will tell you that humankind’s best chance of long-term survival occurs with a global population of around four billion.

We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved.

A new criterion has been added, the conservation of the environment so that in the long run life, including human life, can continue. This new consideration must be taken into account at all levels and in all departments of government and in the boardrooms of every industrial enterprise. It is no longer sufficient simply to quantify the elements of existence as in old-fashioned material economics; conservation means taking notice of the quality of existence as well... The problem is of course to give some value to that quality and perhaps the only way to do this is to try and work out the cost in terms of loss of amenities, loss of holiday and recreation facilities, loss of property values, loss of contact with nature, loss of health standards and loss of food resources, if proper conservation methods are not used. Looked at in that light it may well turn out that money spent on proper pollution control, urban and rural planning and the control of exploitation of wild stocks of plants or animals on land and in the sea, is the less expensive alternative in the long run... The conservation of nature, the proper care for the human environment and a general concern for the long-term future of the whole of our planet are absolutely vital if future generations are to have a chance to enjoy their existence on this earth.

Would you kill half the population today in order to save our species from extinction?

I would rather use a hundred years to bring about a new world, a better world, by evolution, with all the blessings of civilization, than bring it about by a bloody revolution, as they have in Russia, by shooting down about 30,000 men and women.

We have opened a new chapter of hope in the lives of 7 billion people on the planet. We have [the planet] on loan from future generations. We have today reassured these future generations that we will all together … give them a better earth.

What will sustain us in the difficult years to come is a dream of the future that is not just better than ecological collapse, but a whole lot better than the barbaric ways our system treats human and nonhuman life right now.

We should have a population for which we have sufficient out of all that is produced by the earth. This can only be possible when the needs of the population and the planning done for it are on a global basis.

One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe — wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land mass a fit habitation for Man. The globe should be our and not nature's home, and we no longer nature's guests.

Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.

The world is desperately imperfect. Even if a quarter of the working people were engrossed in new thoughts and inventions and lived off the others, humanity would still gain tremendously thanks to the constant stream of inventions and intellectual work emerging from this horde of people striving upward.

Here we are today. But in a hundred years how do you want the world to be? Everybody should get together to make the world a better place

Can we grasp that there is more than enough land surface, capable of restoration, to support and feed in comfort a larger population than now exists on this globe?