I am currently writing a new statement. In the meantime, here are a few relevant quotes, and a list of resources.
“… human life represents a continuous process of metabolism in receiving energy, transforming it, and expending it in the form of excretions…. [This] process… ought to receive attention not only from the biologist but also from the sociologist, i.e., from the investigator of human behavior and of social processes.”
Pitirim A. Sorokin, Hunger as a factor in Human Affairs.
“Where as other animals depend largely on genetic changes for adaptation to environment, man’s chief form of adjustment has been through agencies external to himself but largely of his own fashioning. Instead of developing claws, wings, hard shell coverings, horns, etc., man has constructed tools, clothing, weapons, and various other devices from the materials of his environment.”
Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology.
“[a] flash of lightning illuminated the object and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy demon to whom [he] had given life.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus.
“The carrying capacity for human populations has been forced upward in a progressive series of steps…. Each step represented some cultured advance, like elimination of some competitor or over-exploitation of some resource, with a consequent overriding of the previous regulatory mechanisms restricting the population growth…. As the ecosystems… could not receive any greater input of energy, this increased… population could only be achieved in one of two ways. It could be effected if there were a corresponding reduction in the biomass of competing species populations…. Or it could be achieved by “mining” accumulated resources of the ecosystem….”
Arthur S Boughey, Man and the Environment.
“To a people who had known no other restrictions on their hunting than those imposed by the nature of their crude weapons, the thought that it might be possible [with rifles] to kill too many deer did not occur.”
Farley Mowat, The Desperate People.
“Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man’s culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance… “
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
“Eventually they cannot survive in the conditions they themselves have made.”