Where there is no vision, the people perish

-Proverbs 29:18 from the King James Version of the Bible  

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

-Charles Kettering (1876-1958)  

It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.

-John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th U.S. president,
from speech dedicating the National Wildlife Federation Building
3 March 1961  

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We cherish our children’s future. We are all mortal.

-John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35^th U.S. President

If we are the future and we're dying, there is no future.

-Zambian youngster quoted in UNHCR Refugees Vol 4, 2001  

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

-Dian Fossey (1932-1986)

…our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. “Spend now and someone else will pay later.”

-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1989   

The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.

-Anna Quindlen, “It's about changing the way we all live now,” 
Newsweek, 19 Sep 05   

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

-Wendell Berry, “Living in the Future,” The Unsettling of America 1977 

No one "discovers" the future. The future is not a discovery. The future is not a destiny. The future is a decision, an intervention. Do nothing and we drift fatalistically into a future not driven by technology alone, but by other people's need, greed, and creed. The future is not some dim and distant region out there in time. The future is a reality that is coming to pass with each passing day, with each passing decision.

-Leonard Sweet from SoulTsunami, 1999  

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

-Eric Hoffer (1902–1983), Reflections on the Human Condition 1973  

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.

-John Sawhill, former President of The Nature Conservancy
[submitted by Allen D. Decker]

Among politicians and businessmen, “Pragmatism” is the current term for "To hell with our children."

-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

If they survive, today's children will inherit a world that our fathers and grandfathers have ravaged, where the seas are acidic cesspools that the whales have fled, where rain forests are Indian memories never to return, and where human greed has plundered Mother Earth's innards and turned human genes into factories for profit. They will inherit a diminished planet where fresh water is increasingly rare, and where fresh air is a commodity… We live in a world that fears and hates its young. How else can one explain the bequest of such a foul, polluted, and hollow inheritance?

-Mumia Abu-Jamal quoted by Johann C. Arnold in Endangered, 2000  

Sooner or later, we sit down to a banquet of consequences.

-Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)  

If a way to be better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst.

-Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)  

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
at the signing of the Wilderness Act, Sep 1964  

It's crime against the future, against everyone who is going to come after us. No one has ever figured out a better way to permanently alter and degrade the world around us than this. To strip mine the future. If we could imagine how we would feel about people who would have done that to us several generations ago, if it had happened then, then we can imagine how people will one day consider us in this regard, unless again, we do something soon. At the moment we are not doing anything about it. Though our scientific system has done a tremendous job alerting us to the dimensions of this problem, our political system, our cultural system so far has yet to respond in any meaningful way. The reason that it hasn't responded goes back to this question at which we began. As long as we consider ourselves to be enviably at the center of everything and our immediate comfort and gratification the most important of all tasks, it is extremely unlikely that our leadership will rise to the occasion and demand of us any real change.

- Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God and the Environmental Crisis,
sermon at Carlisle, Massachusetts 18 March 2001  

I look forward to a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

-John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), 35th U.S. president  

The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.

-Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005), founder of Earth Day

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)  

Doomsday is quite within our reach, if we will only stretch for it.

-Loudon Wainwright quoted in Life, 1/28/72 *  

We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let's hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.

-Woody Allen

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers: a demographic explosion that triggers social chaos and spreads death, nuclear delirium and the quasi-annihilation of the species... Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.

-Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997)  

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

-Marya Mannes  

In the long run it is the cumulative effect that matters. One can do much. And one and one and one and one can move mountains.

-Joan Ward-Harris  

If we can change our priorities, achieve balance and understanding in our roles as human beings in a complex world, the coming era can well be that of a richer civilization, not its end.

-Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982)  

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless Calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Strength to Love, 1963  

It's not clear what the wisest path is. But if we continue on the current one, we're going to create a world we really don't want.

-David Tillman, University of Minnesota ecologist,
quoted by the Associated Press, 22 Feb 2000  

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

-Günther Grass, interview in New Statesman & Society,
London, 22 June 1990  

"We've assumed that the future of climate will look just like the past," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "We can say with high confidence that that's not true."

-Peter Gleick quoted in "Scientists Define Global Climate Change Crisis",
Environmental News Service, 24 Feb 2000  

Thoughtful people are concerned with the future because that is the only area of experience about which anything can be done. We cannot change the past, and the present is gone as soon as it is reported, but the future is that in which we can make a difference.

-Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), The Future of the Christian, 1971  

Ethical and moral questions and how we answer them may determine whether primal scenes will continue to be a source of joy and comfort to future generations. The decisions are ours and we have to search our minds and souls for the right answers… We must be eternally vigilant, embrace the broad concept of an environmental ethic to survive.

-Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982)  

It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century.

-Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy"
in Atlantic Monthly, February '94  

This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

-Arthur C. Clarke  

A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can.

-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1989  

We will not have served the water needs of Americans if we meet only the requirements of today's population. A prudent nation must look ahead and plan for tomorrow.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Special Message to Congress, "To Renew a Nation"
8 March 1968  

I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.

-Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th President of the United States
Speech in Washington, D.C., 1900 *  

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

-Mohandes Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)  

"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

-Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989  

In 1776, this continent could absorb lots of bad human nature. The frontier was before us. Now, though our outward frontier has come to an end, instead of facing our problems squarely we keep looking to expand our frontiers inwardly, always for the purpose of exploitation. We have gone into the inner recesses of the atom and the nucleus of the cell. The exploitation of both atom and cell is not at all unlike ripping open the prairies, the very heart of our continent, or going into Third World countries like Brazil, where skilled welders are paid a dollar an hour to make farm machinery for America's fields. It is all of the same greed.

-Wes Jackson, "Meeting the Expectations of the Land"
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987

All futurity
Seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled;
Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage.

-William Blake (1757–1827) The Four Zoas, "Night the Eighth"  

Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.

-Ruben Alves, Tomorrow's Child, 1972

There is a growing consensus amongst scientists and economists that the planet is in peril. But the solutions to our problems depend less on technological advances and economic growth than on human will guided by a "moral compass" requiring a change of heart about how we live and work, how we produce things and how we treat other people and other species.

-Charles Birch in the scientific magazine 21C

More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise to end up in sumptuous misery.

-John W. Gardner, Secretary of health, education and welfare 1965-1968 
from No Easy Victories, ed. Helen Rowan

With Mother Earth in peril, we must seek opportunities in each community to safeguard the environment for all families, now and in the future. Time isn't on our side. Degradation of our planet is occurring rapidly. The only hope we have of rescuing it is our determination to change the course of events by standing together with others and making demands of our leaders.

-Susan Jezsik Varlamoff, The Polluters, 1993

There are some, I know, who see beautification as a frill, as an extra, or as something that is luxurious enough to postpone. Well, they make me impatient because I am convinced that beauty and order in our environment are not frills. I am convinced that they are urgent necessities because they will determine whether our grandchildren can live in a decent land or whether they will be surrounded by glittering junkheaps.

-Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) 36th President of the United States,
Remarks at a Reception, 29 March 1968

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

- E. B. White (1899-1985), "Coon Tree" 14 Jun 1956,
The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East,
the West, the North, the South, 1962

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of the Good Land, 1981  

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

-Jimmy (James Earl) Carter, 39th President of the United States  

The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.

-Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989  

The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North.

-Ross Gelbspan, History at Risk: The Crisis of the Global Climate, 1999  

If we continue...to consume the world until there's no more to consume, then there's going to come a day, sure as hell, when our children or their children or their children's children are going to look back on us - on you and me - and say to themselves, "My God, what kind of monsters were these people?"

-Daniel Quinn in Utne Reader, Sept/Oct 1993

The children are our future. And that is why, ultimately, we're screwed unless we do something about it. If you haven't noticed, the children who are our future are good-looking, but they aren't all that bright. As dense as they might be, they will eventually notice that adults have spent all the money, spread disease, and turned the planet into a smoky, filthy ball of death. We're raising an entire generation of dumb, pissed-off kids who know where the handguns are kept. This is not a good recipe for a happy future.

-Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future, 1997

we, the generation that faces the next century, can add the . . . solemn injunction "If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable."

-Petra Kelly (1947–1992), German Green Party founder
quoted in Vanity Fair, January '93  

Now they've handed us the mantle;
They've handed us the keys
Left us sitting here in limbo
In the lap of luxury
With a pocket full of credit cards
And a mountain full of debt
And a picture of the future
That I'd just as soon forget
With this heavy metal poison
And the voices on TV
And a million cartoon images
Of how it's supposed to be
With a changing set of values
More depressing every day
Till I wish that just like Grandpa
I could make my getaway
But there's no place left to go

-Tonio K from his song "Stuck" on Ole (The Persistence of Memory)  

Man enters the world with closed hands, as if to say: "The world is mine." He leaves it with open hands, as if to say: "Behold, I take nothing with me."

from The Midrash, (400-500 A.D.) Jewish Commentary on Biblical texts  

What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ -- can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father --that present which is Himself and therefore us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.

-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity  

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;  
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion -
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.
They shall build up the ancient ruins,
they shall raise up the former devastations;
they shall repair the ruined cities,
the devastations of many generations.

-the prophet Isaiah (c.760-690 B.C.)
Isaiah 61:1-4 from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

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