Quotes About Sustainability

plastic-wrapped evermore?

It is, but we can only help people by giving less than we take away from them. We enlarge the oasis by increasing the desert. That is the science of time and housekeeping. Some call it economics.

If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.

It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.

Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labor of all.

Nulla darà la possibilità di sopravvivenza sulla terra quanto l'evoluzione verso una dieta vegetariana

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals—this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

The single thought that can empower us to empower the world: Mankind's use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous-because the human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.

Transportation and education pay immense social and economic dividends in the long run, but are difficult to make profitable in the short run.

She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.

It would be good if there could be an end to need in this world; it would be good if people did not have to worry about what would happen to them if their crops failed, or if their cattle got sick and died, or if they lost the jobs on which they, along with a number of hungry mouths, depended.

And they both had the land about them; the sky that went on forever, it seemed, and was filled with sun and with the air that they all needed, that the cattle needed, that the animals in the Kalahari needed--there was plenty of that; they had Botswana. So everybody had the things that mattered, when you came to think of it...

But that was what the world was like; we battered and bashed and poured out clouds of smoke and chemicals and particles of every description to bring forth our little objects of desire, our baubles.

If we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out. We can't just drill our way out. We can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned, American way. We're going to invent our way out, working together.

We can no more get out of a relationship with nature than we can get out of history.

and harvesting

We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.

An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.

But rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way.

We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.