Quotes About Sustainability

The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little "real world" evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.

There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed.

Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.

we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate.

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.

A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. — Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

If an eventual nine billion people all consumed materials at the rate of the average late-twentieth-century American, that would require an increase in worldwide steel production by a factor of five, copper by a factor of eight, and aluminum by a factor of nine.

Growth of what? For whom? At what cost? Paid by whom? What is the real need here, and what is the most direct and efficient way for those who have that need to satisfy it? How much is enough? What are the obligations to share?

My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.

The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.

The more users there are, the more resource is used. The more resource is used, the less there is per user.

Understanding layers of limits and keeping an eye on the next upcoming limiting factor is not a recipe for perpetual growth, however. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

Killing an animal to make a coat is sin. It wasn't meant to be, and we have no right to do it. A woman gains status when she refuses to see anything killed to be put on her back. Then she's truly beautiful.

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.

Deep and sustainable change...requires changes in behavior among those who do not welcome the change.

Conservation," Pinchot famously wrote, "means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.

If births continued and deaths were severely curtailed, overpopulation would soon cause devastating effects.

Energy is wealth. The two are one and the same. Think about how much money the world spends each year on power.

actually exist like a racial or religious community. It is a form of absurdity. For even on its own terms this composition is wildly unsustainable and contradictory. Gay men and gay women have almost nothing in common. It may be too pedestrian to even mention, but gay men and lesbians do not always form the warmest of relationships.

Treating water to reuse or recycle water does not necessarily mean it's going to be drinkable.

The only real answer, the really simple one that neither philanthrocapitalists nor green technologists want to hear, is that we have to reduce our energy consumption altogether.

Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island." VR is the new solution to climate change—or maybe the ultimate surrender to its inevitability. As resources vanish and economic conditions worsen, technological simulations can fill in where real wealth has disappeared. "The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted.

The myth of individuality made capitalism possible and has sustained it to this day.

It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.