We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
David SuzukiRead
Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.
Interpretation
We need to shift away from fossil fuels to protect water and the environment.
David Suzuki emphasizes the importance of transitioning from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources. This shift is crucial not only for reducing individual consumption but also for mitigating negative impacts on water supplies and the overall environment, highlighting the interconnectedness of energy production and ecological health.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, one might quote this to emphasize the necessity of sustainable energy.
We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
As parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.
One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
Climate change is hugely exacerbated by changing patterns of how we choose to live, often in danger zones such as extremely vulnerable coastal zones - from New Jersey to the Philippines. This enormously increases the economic and human costs of hurricanes, rising seas and changing weather patterns.
In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously
Environmental protection doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can't separate the impact on the environment from the impact on our families and communities.
There is an old belief that solving environmental problems can only be achieved by first building enough economic wealth so we can 'afford to save the environment.' This 'Kuznets Curve' thinking has never been correct and must be abandoned once and for all if we are serious about economic development for a thriving humanity on Earth.
Any regeneration project that fails to put environmental and social benefits at its very heart is unlikely to achieve anything more than a very short-lived spasm of spurious prosperity
Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.
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