Quote

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

The pollution problem is always seen as someone who was doing something bad that has to be stopped. To me, pollution is doing something bad and good. People don't pollute because they like polluting. They do it because it's a cheaper way of producing something else.

Sooner or later, we will have to recognise that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans.

There is a growing recognition of the importance of really bringing pollution under control.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

The strongest governments on earth cannot clean up pollution by themselves. They must rely on each ordinary person, like you and me, on our choices, and on our will.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

What they are doing is taking something that otherwise creates pollution and turning it into something useful.

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.