We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.

China has led the world in new tree planting; in fact, over the last several years, China has planted 40 percent as many tress as the rest of the world put together. Since 1981, all citizens of China older than age eleven (and younger than sixty) have been formally required to plant at least three trees per year. To date, China has planted approximately 100 million acres of new tress. Following China, the countries with the largest net gains in tress include the U.S., India, Vietnam, and Spain.

My suggestion is the necessity of a national policy to provide grid independent solar panel houses to these dwellings which can be extended to other 140 million houses gradually. Also the street lights can be provided on community based solar panels in villages, towns and cities. This will bring to India a vibrant solar panel industry right from innovative development, efficiency enhancement, production, distribution, marketing and maintenance of trouble free solar energy system as a business. This integrated business solution will bring down the cost of solar power generation and also distribution loss. The action of creating solar paneled houses and street lights will release nearly 50,000 to 60,000 MW of power for use by various sectors of the economy propelling national growth. It will also be useful for providing low cost electricity to other developing nations in the world.

I believe that the ten billion people expected to be present at the end of the century will enjoy a far better quality of life if we conserve half of the planet for nature than if we consume nature entirely.

When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.

We need a reset in the way the economy grows around the world.

"Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich. [...]

"But we have also," continued the management consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship's peanut." [...]

"So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances.

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do — using only today’s tools — the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches.

One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.

trees should be trees

…environmental quality is higher where income is more equitably distributed, where more people are literate, and civil and political rights are better respected. It’s people power, not economic growth persay, that protects local air and water quality. Likewise, it is citizen pressure on government and companies for more stringent standards, not the mere increase in revenue that compels industries to switch to cleaner technologies.

A forest is a living thing like a human body...each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver...all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months....Listen, and you can hear the forest breath.

If we are not graced with an instinctive knowledge of how to make our technologized world a safe and balanced ecosystem, we must figure out how to do it. We need more scientific research and more technological restraint. It is probably too much to hope that some great Ecosystem Keeper in the sky will reach down and put right our environmental abuses. It is up to us. It should not be impossibly difficult. Birds — whose intelligence we tend to malign — know not to foul the nest. Shrimps with brains the size of lint particles know it. Algae know it. One-celled microorganisms know it. It is time for us to know it too.