Quotes About Sustainability

And the main fight will be over water, not oil.

Solar energy, in its many forms, has accustomed us to the idea that using energy must create huge environmental impacts, either by polluting or by occupying vast tracts of land. Terrestrial energy is so highly concentrated that it can provide us with enormous amounts of energy while barely leaving a trace. Combined with the contributions of solar power, terrestrial energy offers us the opportunity to power the world while eliminating all manners of environmental degradation.

The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on.

When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees.

Kenneth Boulding's bon mot, 'To believe that the economy can grow forever in a finite world, you have to be a madman or an economist'.

What links the peoples of the world together is no longer the rule of civilization or the interplay of demand and supply, but their shared dependence on biophysical life-support systems

Sustainable happiness is not the absence of problems. As Nichiren writes: "Though worldly troubles may arise, never let them disturb you. No one can avoid problems, not even sages or worthies.

Agriculture for an honorable and high-minded man, is the best of all occupations and arts by which men procure the means of living.

But what so different of eating plants? Everything has it's life. If you are so pure, why not just stop eating? So you can have no shit?

Everybody says women are like water. I think it's because water is the source of life, and it adapts itself to its environment. Like women, water also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life....

Saving the forests is not only a question of money," she said. "There also has to be awareness and education.

Fresh food is a luxury everyone can afford.

While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries.

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.

Ningún otro primate ha tenido nunca el peso que ponemos sobre el planeta en semejante grado. En términos ecológicos, somos casi una paradoja; gran tamaño y vida prolongada, pero abundantes hasta lo grotesco. Somos una plaga.

Wilson came up with this: "When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.

In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.

It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.

re: the US agriculture industry: " This puts us in the odd position of consuming fossil fuels --geologically one of the rarest and most useful resources ever discovered-- to provide a substitute for dirt --the cheapest and most widely available agricultural input imaginable.

many currently profitable conventional farming methods would become uneconomical if their true costs were incorporated into market pricing. Direct financial subsidies, and failure to include costs of depleting soil fertility and exporting pollutants, continue to encourage practices that degrade the land

People tend to assume that organic farming and sustainability go hand in hand. But that's not necessarily the case - and it hasn't been for most of history. While going organic has some big advantages, even today most organic farmers still rely on the plow - the chief culprit in the this story. Why? Because it provides cheap, reliable weed suppression." David Montgomery - Growing a Revolution

With rare exceptions, the fields of all countries have been made to bear their crops without the least reference to the interests of future generations.

Across the board, dietary advice typically focuses on what and how much to eat, with remarkably little attention paid to how farming practices influence the nutritional quality of food and whether the "right foods" pack the nutrients they once had.

We come into the world as wild things and go out the same way, no matter how many boxes of lead or concrete we sheath about our bones (and the faster we consume the resources that eons of creative wildness have left us, the faster will the wild forces of deterioration pull us down). So it is not enough to look back and admire wildness as our heritage, we must look forward to it as well.