The word “ecology” (originally œcology) was first coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s leading German follower, based on the Greek word oikos, or household. Ironically, the word “economy,” to which ecology is often nowadays counterposed, was derived much earlier from the same Greek root—in this instance oikonomia, or household management. The close family relationship between these two concepts was fully intended by Haeckel, who defined ecology as the study of Darwin’s “economy of nature.”

The modern world worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen.

Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.

A stark choice faces humanity: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

When asked whether class war existed, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Describing a meeting "typical of those which happen every day in the City of London" A group of Indonesian businessmen organized a lunch to raise £300 million to finance the clearing of a rain forest and the construction of a pulp paper plant. What struck me was how financial rationalism often overcomes common sense; that profit itself is a good thing whatever the activity, whenever the occasion. What happened to the Indonesian rain forest was dependent upon financial decisions made over lunch that day. The financial benefits would come to the institutions in London, Paris, or New York. Very little, if any, would go to the local people…. The rain forest may be geographically located in the Far East, but financially it might as well be located in London’s Square Mile.

Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centers, and causing an ever increasing preponderance of town population … disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil.

In its history, the EPA has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the EPA is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos, and chlorofluorocarbons.

The first law of hydrodynamics is that water flows toward money.

When the sportswear company Puma decided to “go green” and put together an environmental profit and loss account in 2011, it quickly found that, if implemented, the corporation would have to dissolve itself.

A 2015 UN-sponsored study estimated the annual unpaid costs of global industrial agriculture at over $3 trillion—significantly more than the economic value of the food produced.

World Bank economists calculate that the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population uses close to 60 percent of all the world’s resources. [...] If this richest 10 percent reduced their consumption to the average consumption of the rest of humanity, total global resource use would be cut in half. [...] A 2015 report by the British charity Oxfam found that the wealthiest 10 percent were responsible for half of all emissions of greenhouse gases, whereas the poorest half of the world’s people were responsible for about 10 percent.

It is estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the food grown in the United States goes to waste. Food is left in the field if it doesn’t meet certain cosmetic standards of large buyers, even if it is perfectly good quality. Supermarkets routinely overstock their produce shelves in deliberate displays of abundance, knowing that a portion will spoil and be thrown away. Globally, about one-third of food is wasted, amounting to about 1.8 billion tons and worth approximately $1 trillion.93 All of this wasted food means wasted water, labor power, energy, and all the other resources that went into making it.

A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

Point eight is enough. "In fact I've concluded that it's really a good thing for people not to be 100% happy. I've started to live in accordance with a philosophy that can be summed up in the phrase "Point eight is enough," meaning "0.8 is enough."

You might remember the TV show from the 70s called "Eight is Enough," about a family with eight children. That's the source of my new motto. I don't know that 0.8 is the right number, but I do believe that when I'm not feeling 100% happy, I shouldn't feel guilty or angry, or think that anything unusual is occurring. I shouldn't set 100% as the norm, without which there must be something wrong. Instead, I might just as well wait a little while, and I'll feel better. I won't make any important decisions about my life at a time when I'm feeling less than normally good.

In a sense I tend now to suspect that it was necessary to leave the Garden of Eden. Imagine a world where people are in a state of euphoria all the time — being high on heroin, say. They'd have no incentive to do anything. What would get done? What would happen? The whole world would soon collapse. It seems like intelligent design when everybody's set point is somewhere less than 100%."

Fridman asks: "When you go up to heaven and meet God and get to ask one question that would get answered, what question would you ask?" "What kind of browser do you have up there?"