Quotes About Sustainability

They are near the bottom of the food chain - a meal for fish and birds - while humans eat from the top of the food chain, consuming an astonishing array of what lies on the planet. But eventually, even we become food for the worms. Shakespeare saw this connection, writing in Hamlet, "A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of a fish that hath fed of that worm.

It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet.

EVERY DAY, AMERICANS go out and buy about ten million cut flowers. After all I've seen, that really doesn't sound like much. It works out, on a daily basis, to one flower for every twenty-five people. Another way to look at it: Every man, woman, and child gets fourteen stems a year. That's just over one flower a month. How can anybody get by on one flower a month?

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better.

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all. —LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIANT CITY (1967)

Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation.

Things look different in real life. In real life only food and energy count. Did you know that the world reserves of wheat, rice, and other grains are at their lowest level in twenty years?

The definition of gross national product is nonsense, because they don't put such factors as environmental damage and limited resources into the calculation. In the mean time there is another parameter, the gross domestic product, but this is not much better.

It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.

If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?

There is currently more sprawl covering American soil than was ever intended by its inventors. While there are some people who truly enjoy living in this environment, there are many others who would prefer to walk to school, bicycle to work, or simply spend less time in the car.

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."3

In fact, the world's rich countries are rich because of the energy they consumed – and the emissions that resulted. Thus, it makes sense for them to have a greater responsibility for taking the first steps toward cleaning up the problem.

I'm super supportive of locally grown foods and farmers. Here in L.A., I know all of my farmers markets and go there weekly.

Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.

If you run a business, and I see F1 as a business, if you have to go back every five weeks saying 'oh, I need another two million', it gets old pretty quick. Then the trust is lost.

In the United States, there is a restaurant called The Outback Steakhouse, and I could survive in there for several weeks at least, sustaining myself on bloomin' onions and, I'm sure, their legitimate and very Australian cuisine. In the real Outback? I give myself about 14 minutes.

The fact is, I made $400 a week and only for 26 weeks a year. I never had any money.

In Cleveland, I'm so fortunate that we're surrounded by farms with an endless variety of beautiful vegetables. For me, I always eat very tightly with the season, even if the season is only six weeks.

I don't know if the money I've earned is going to need to last me for the next few weeks or the rest of my life.

I love being on the road, but to make a living as a road comic, you have to be on it most weeks out of the year. That's just too much for me. But I would love to be such a successful road comic that I don't have to go on it every week.

If only meat weren't so delicious! Sure, meat may pave the way to a heart attack. Yes, factory farms torture animals. Indeed, producing a single hamburger patty requires more water than two weeks of showers. But for those of us who are weak-willed, there's nothing like a juicy burger.

I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.

Fifty percent of the weight of the soybean is protein. And what a protein! No other protein that we've known comes so nearly to the basic protein of animals and humans as soybean protein.