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So now the challenge is to imagine a different world where our wealth is in human relations and the things we do together, and we learn to live in balance with the rest of nature.
Although it's difficult, if not impossible, to put a dollar value on the numerous services nature provides, leaving them out of economic calculations means they are often ignored.
For the first time since life appeared on earth, one species- us- is single-handedly altering the physical, chemical and biological nature of earth. We have become a force of nature
If one day I look out from my cabin's porch and see a row of windmills spinning in the distance, I won't curse them. I will praise them. It will mean we are finally getting somewhere.
My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.
From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.
Global trade has advantages. For starters, it allows those of us who live through winter to eat fresh produce year-round. And it provides economic benefits to farmers who grow that food.
We humans have become dependent on plastic for a range of uses, from packaging to products. Reducing our use of plastic bags is an easy place to start getting our addiction under control.
Scientists are being portrayed by much of the power structure in politics and business as having a vested interest - that they're just out to get more grant money by exaggerating the threats.
Corporations are economic entities or structures, and yet they're allowed to fund political candidates, and when those candidates are elected, guess who gets in the door first? It's corporations.
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.
The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.
Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it, is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long-term effect will be.
Think about a seed. Once it lands, it's stuck. It can't move to find better soil, moisture or sunlight. It's able to create every part of itself to grow and reproduce with the help of air, water and sun.
Canada should always open its doors to those who are oppressed or in cases of emergency. When Canada offered refuge to 50,000 boat people in Vietnam in the 1970s, I was particularly proud to be Canadian.
We need love, and to ensure love, we need to have full employment, and we need social justice. We need gender equity. We need freedom from hunger. These are our most fundamental needs as social creatures.
Nature surrounds us, from parks and backyards to streets and alleyways. Next time you go out for a walk, tread gently and remember that we are both inhabitants and stewards of nature in our neighbourhoods.
Japanese people cut their energy use by 25 percent immediately after Fukushima. They showed there was huge opportunity there. And instead, the government simply wants to get those plants up and running again.
And that, quite simply, is the issue. We live in a finite world with finite resources. Although it may sometimes seem quite big, earth is really very small - a tiny blue and green oasis of life in a cold universe.
We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.
Thanks to evolution, our bodies have powerful ways to ward off illness and infection and enable us to live long and healthy lives. Why, then, do health costs continue to climb at unsustainable and frightening rates?
Environmentali sm is really about seeing our place in world in a way that humans have always known up until very recently - that we are part of nature-utterly dependent on the natural world for our well being and survival.
If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.
Japan is a model already to the lie that economic growth is the key to our future. If they can really show an alternative to nukes and fossil fuels, then they will be the poster boy for the renewable energy for the future.
You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.
Environmentalism isn't a discipline or specialty. It's a way of seeing our place in the world. And we need everybody to see the world that way. Don't think 'In order to make a difference I have to become an environmentalist.'
What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.
Doing all we can to combat climate change comes with numerous benefits, from reducing pollution and associated health care costs to strengthening and diversifying the economy by shifting to renewable energy, among other measures.
It's not unexpected that shooting massive amounts of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure into the earth to shatter shale and release natural gas might shake things up. But earthquakes aren't the worst problem with fracking.
The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.
I read in 'Life' magazine that Asians had developed an operation to enlarge eyes, and I yearned to have this done. I wanted to dye my hair brown and to anglicize my name. Self-hate was the most terrible cost of the war years for me.
Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers.
Scientists generally are really chicken about getting involved in some kind of dispute. As a broadcaster, I find it very difficult to urge them, if it is a controversial subject. They don't want to have science being portrayed badly.
The true - the true economy has got to come back into balance with the very biosphere that sustains us. And I think a lot of people just see the green economy as a different way of allowing the corporate agenda to continue to flourish.
Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises - car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.
This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.
Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.
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.
I've always been more interested in organisms that can move on their own than in stationary plants. But when I canoe or hike along the edge of lakes or oceans and see trees that seem to be growing out of rock faces, I am blown away. How do they do it?
People.. especially people in positions of power.. have invested a tremendous amount of effort and time to get to where they are. They really don't want to hear that we're on the wrong path, that we've got to shift gears and start thinking differently.
People don't even understand that every bit of our food was once alive. We take another creature, plant, animal, microorganism, tear it apart in our mouths. And incorporate those molecules into our own bodies. We are the Earth in the most profound way.
I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?
The human brain had a vast memory storage. It made us curious and very creative. Those were the characteristics that gave us an advantage - curiosity, creativity and memory. And that brain did something very special. It invented an idea called 'the future.'
We emerged out of nature, and when we die, we return to nature. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that we will never understand or control. We need to have sacred places where we go with respect, not just looking for resources or opportunity.
Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.
Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.
Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.
The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.
We can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton. What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act.
Scientists and supercomputers have amplified our ability to look ahead. For decades, experts have warned us that human numbers, technology, hyper-consumption and a global economy are altering the chemical, geological, and biological properties of the biosphere.