You know, we humans are programmed to think that big changes on the Earth happened a long time ago, or will happen a long time in the future. What we don't realize is that they actually can happen right now. Right here, right now, while we're alive, in our own hours and days and months and years.

It's important to recognise that humans are not the measure of all things... The Earth is the measure of all things.

I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.

I'm quite fond of Switzerland. I love Switzerland.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.

We don't want the federal government coming in and telling us how to do our environmental remediation or how we're going to do our healthcare.