Quotes About Resources

Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.

They were all alike, these Unwinds; sucking valuable resources from those more deserving, and clinging to their pathetic individuality, rather than accepting peaceful division.

More than 80 percent of the world's energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.

all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.

As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.

The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general "law of environmental limitation of culture." And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: "The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies

many of the racial alarmists were also leaders in the nation's new conservation movement. The blue-blooded toffs who feared that the noble and superior white race was menaced by unwashed rabble also saw wild landscapes as noble and superior wildernesses menaced by the same rabble. Prizing the expert governance of resources, they found little difference between protecting forests and cleaning up the human gene pool.

Rocketing up the growth curve, humankind every year takes ever more of the earth's richness. An often quoted estimate by a team of Stanford biologists is that humans grab "about 40% of the present net primary production in terrestrial ecosystems"—40 percent of the entire world's output of land plants and animals.

Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.

Margulis said, because rival organisms and lack of resources prevent the vast majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This is natural selection, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means available. And all living creatures have a maximum reproductive rate: the greatest number of offspring they can generate in a lifetime.

The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In light of the last eighty years of history in these regions, it is hard to view these moves as enduring successes.

The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn't know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.

I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt's day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries—exceed carrying capacity—and trouble will ensue.

Todo ser que durante el tiempo natural de su vida produce varios huevos o semillas, necesita sufrir destrucción durante algún período de su vida y durante alguna estación o en alguno que otro año, porque de otro modo, por el principio del aumento geométrico llegaría pronto su número a ser tan desordenadamente grande, que no habría país capaz de soportarlo.

making possible huge economies of scale in the application of force majeure. (Subjects whose mind-bogglingly vast numbers beggar Agent First's imagination: it makes no sense, who needs that many slaves?)

Less obviously, concern for the environment is a luxury good. Wealthy Americans are willing to spend more money to protect the environment as a fraction of their incomes than are less wealthy Americans. The same relationship holds true across countries; wealthy nations devote a greater share of their resources to protecting the environment than do poor countries.

One powerful feature of a market economy is that it directs resources to their most productive use. Why doesn't Brad Pitt sell automobile insurance? Because it would be an enormous waste of his unique talents.

economy is the art of making the most of life." Economics is the study of how we do that.

You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Ése era el mundo de la escasez. Ahora, con la distribución y la venta digital, estamos entrando en un mundo de abundancia. Las diferencias son profundas.

We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.

I'm driven by the gaps, the things that are missing, the areas where marginalized people exist - and where the least resources are available for them.

Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission.