Businessman

I am President of the UN created University for Peace, which has a strong commitment to the relationship between peace, security and the environment. I meet with young people around the world and I always come away enthused and encouraged.

I've got used to criticisms and, naturally, I try to make sure I don't listen to the more extreme ones because most of the people who have taken their right-wing extremist view of my life are people that I've never met.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

The Prime Minister of India, at a meeting that I co-chaired a few months ago, stated that any development that is not sustainable is not development.

The tendency is to keep doing things the way you have done them.

We're either going to save Ihe world or no one will be saved.

I am retired from all my official roles, but I am still very active. I have close relationships at the U.N. I don't have any role at the U.N, but I'm still quite cooperative with a number of U.N. activities, in particular to China and that region.

My belief is that the purpose of economic life is to meet the social needs of people.

Licences to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

I have a cow's valve in my heart.

Anyone who is seriously interested in me would usually do a little more homework and realise that the extreme criticisms are almost exclusively ideologically based.

I believe we are going to move into a situation where the more effective conferences will be smaller, more specialized, more focused, with occasional large gatherings to get the attention of the larger world.

What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

In addition to this, they already have a fuel cell car on the road in Japan. It is subsidized from within the corporation because they are still at a high cost.

Don't accept that you can't make a difference. Because if you can't make a difference, you won't make a difference, and if you put a multiplier on that we will continue on an unsustainable pathway.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

We must, from here on in, all go down the same path... There may not be another chance.

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.