Herman E. Daly Quotes

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

We need an economics fit for purpose in a finite and entropic world.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.

Nonrenewable resources should be exploited, but at a rate equal to the creation of renewable substitutes.

Growth is widely thought to be the panacea for all the major economic ills of the modern world.

But the macro-economy is not the Whole. It too is a Part, a part of the larger natural economy, the ecosphere, and its growth does inflict opportunity costs on the finite Whole that must be counted.

Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.

While the invisible hand looks after the private sector, the invisible foot kicks the public sector to pieces.

The problem with the World Bank has to do with development - the spreading of Western over-consumption worldwide.

Growth chestnuts have to be placed on the unyielding anvil of biophysical realities and then crushed with the hammer of moral argument.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.