Quotes About Sustainability

Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species.4

Raw materials and energy are exhaustible – the more you use, the less you have. Knowledge, in contrast, is a growing resource – the more you use, the more you have.

Even powerful nations such as China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign.

At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water.

In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we have only this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens.

whenever long-term environmental considerations demand some painful short-term sacrifice, nationalists might be tempted to put immediate national interests first, and reassure themselves that they can worry about the environment later, or just leave it to people elsewhere. Alternatively, they may simply deny the problem.

Kadaise žalia ir žydra m?s? planeta pamažu tampa iš betono ir plastiko nulietu prekybos centru.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them.

Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.

Consequently, from the very advent of agriculture, worries about the future became major players in the theatre of the human mind.

Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels.

Sin embargo, el crecimiento económico no salvará al ecosistema global; justo lo contrario, porque es la causa de la crisis ecológica. Y el crecimiento económico no resolverá la disrupción tecnológica: esta se afirma en la invención de tecnologías cada vez más disruptivas.

principal tenet is that economic growth is the

Yet can the economic pie grow indefinitely? Every pie requires raw material and energy. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo Sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?

La consideración tradicional del mundo como un pastel de tamaño invariable presupone que solo hay dos tipos de recursos en el mundo: materias primas y energía. Pero en realidad hay tres tipos de recursos: materias primas, energía y conocimiento. Las materias primas y la energía pueden agotarse: cuanto más las usamos, menos tenemos. El conocimiento, en cambio, es un recurso en aumento: cuanto más lo usamos, más tenemos.

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy.

With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done.

Male chicks and imperfect female chicks are picked off the conveyor belt and are then asphyxiated in gas chambers, dropped into automatic shredders, or simply thrown into the rubbish, where they are crushed to death. Hundreds of millions of chicks die each year in such hatcheries.

Tangan-tangan tambahan itu teramat diperlukan di ladang-ladang. Namun mulut-mulut ekstra itu dengan cepat menghabiskan surplus makanan, sehingga lebih banyak lagi ladang yang harus ditanami.

a human being needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury.

Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

Las materias primas y la energía pueden agotarse: cuanto más las usamos, menos tenemos. El conocimiento, en cambio, es un recurso en aumento: cuanto más lo usamos, más tenemos.

ecological collapse.