118 Quotes by Jeremy Rifkin

One thing I’ve learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There’s no fait accompli to any of this.

We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.

We are entering a new phase in human history – one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

They’re now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.

The most important question facing humanity is this: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?

It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there’s no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.

The laws of thermodynamics tell us something quite different. Economic activity is merely borrowing low-entropy energy inputs from the environment and transforming them into temporary products and services of value. In the transformation process, often more energy is expended and lost to the environment than is embedded in the particular good or service being produced.

The new science takes us from a colonial vision of nature as an enemy to pillage and enslave, to a new vision of nature as a community to nurture. The right to exploit, harness, and own nature in the form of property is tempered by the obligation to steward nature and treat it with dignity and respect. The utility value of nature is slowly giving way to the intrinsic value of nature.

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn’t have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.