William E. Rees Quotes

#1. We do not have an ecological crisis. The ecosphere has a human crisis. Our 'story' about our place in the scheme of things has somehow gone awry in the industrial age ...

William E. Rees

#2. One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.

William E. Rees

#3. The good news is that ... humans are gifted by the potential for self-awareness and intelligent choice, and knowing our circumstance is an invitation to change.

William E. Rees

#4. To prefer paper to gold is to prefer high risk to lower risk, instability to stability, inflation to steady long term values, a system of very low grade performance to a system of higher, though not perfect performance.

William E. Rees

#5. Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain them.

William E. Rees