Quotes About Sustainability

Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place nears living as if your children's future mattered

Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.

The wind blows every day, every day the sun shines, every day the waves roll against the shore, and the earth is warm below us. We can understand these renewable sources of energy as given to us, since they are the sources that have powered life on the planet for as long as there has been a planet. We need not destroy the earth to make use of them.

While city folks may be separated from the sources of what they consume, they can exercise reciprocity through how they spend their money. While the digging of the leeks and the digging of the coal may be too far removed to see, we consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets. We can use our dollars as the indirect current of reciprocity.

not 'What can we take?' but 'What can we give to Mother Earth?' That's how it's supposed to be

to be indigenous is to protect life on earth

As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their (ecology students, any young people) vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can't imagine the generosity of geese?

I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end. But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all life's beings can flourish.

In return for the privilege of breath

It seems hard to argue with gratitude for berries.

Hyde reminds us that in a gift economy, one's freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else's capital.

We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.

Unlike juicy fruits and berries, which invite you to eat them right away before they spoil, nuts protect themselves with a hard, almost stony shell and a green, leathery husk. The tree does not mean for you to eat them right away with juice dripping down your chin. They are designed to be food for winter, when you need fat and protein, heavy calories to keep you warm. They are safety for hard times, the embryo of survival.

Everybody lives downstream.

biocultural or reciprocal restoration.

Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage.

Restoring a habitat, no matter how good intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves us as arborators of what is good, when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests. By what we want.

we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.

We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn - we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then give it away.

You cannot do more with less.

A single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love - true heart love - must grow

You may not know this, but the cold-water stress that the haenyeo endure is greater than for any other human group in the world.