"After two centuries of rises in labor productivity, the liquidation of natural resources at their extraction cost rather than their replacement value, and the exploitation of living systems as if they were free, infinite, and in perpetual renewal, it is people who have become an abundant resource, while nature is becoming disturbingly scarce," Chapter 1, p. 8.

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, 'Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service," Chapter 1, p. 16.

"Because of the gas's unique burning properties, no one was directly killed by the hydrogen fire in the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. Some died in a diesel-oil fire or by jumping out of the airship, but all sixty-two passengers who rode the flaming dirigible back to earth, as the clear hydrogen flames swirled upward above them, escaped unharmed," Chapter 2, p. 35.

"If...