To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. – Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907

Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work. – Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress. – John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957