Jonathon Porritt Quotes

I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible.

The World Health Organization recently published some data showing that each overweight person causes and additional one tonne of CO2 to be emitted every year. With one billion people overweight around the world-of whom at least 300 million are obese-that's an additional one billion tonnes.

What may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit at great cost, simply cannot work for the humankind. Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth,on gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining skin of soil and forest

Deficit consumption is, in effect, drawing down on the capital entitlements of future generations

The huge arrogance of the companies developing GMO crops and their determination to destroy the line of accountability which links the developer to the product is breath-taking. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, there will be a great benefit to those who have taken a stance against genetically modified organisms.

Fundamentally transforming the foundations of the economy is the biggest contribution we can make towards building a sustainable future. The current economic crisis may be painful, but it will be nothing compared with the crises we will face if we continue to grow in a way that threatens the life-support systems on which we rely

Humankind's greatest priority is to reintegrate with the natural world.

The core values that underpin sustainable development - interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice - are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed

The future will be green, or not at all

"The ultimate recession": a recession caused not by failed regulation and bankers' greed, but by very high oil prices, food and water shortages, disappearing forests, accelerating climate change, forced migration and mass civil disruption ... The long and the short of it, unfortunately, is this: more politicians still believe that economic recovery depends on continuing to live beyond our means (financially and ecologically) than on learning to live within our means. And that's why the ultimate "Perfect Storm" recession still looms on the horizon

Keeping people on side is a precondition of making any progress on sustainability issues

The collapse of the world's banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today

If something is sustainable, it means we can go on doing it indefinitely. If it isn't, we can't

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

We need to move away from crass, consumption-driven materialism by de-materialising status

Living more sustainably means living happier, more balanced and potentially more fulfilled lives than most of us 'choose' to live today, whatever Jeremy Clarkson may have to say about that!

Absolutely love the new campaign from the Optimum Population Trust: do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children - or even no children. The lifetime CO2 emissions of a UK citizen amount to 750 tonnes (the equivalent - apparently - of 620 return flights between London and New York), so the extra 10 million by which our population will rise between now and 2074 will, over their lifetimes, emit around 7½ billion tonnes of CO2 ... "births averted" is probably the most single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using