Quotes About Sustainability

They then started to test the other children, and it was discovered that none of us had sufficient vitamin C, D, or A in our diets. We never had fruit, never had raw leafy greens, never had milk. There was plenty of this on the Island, you know, but it was all sold, every scrap of it, to the mainland, and had been since slavery time.

Take care how you place your moccasins upon the Earth, step with care, for the faces of the future generations are looking up from the Earth waiting their turn for life.

each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth.

Her senior thesis was based on the notion that no one should be allowed to own more land than could be worked in a day, by hand.

work to make the routine drinking of bottled water a distant nightmare. Water was not meant to be polluted, any more than human blood, which is mostly water, is meant to be contaminated. How dare we bring anyone into the world who must, anywhere on earth, run from rain?

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

In the United States alone, about 30 to 40 percent of our entire food supply is wasted every year, according to estimates from the USDA. I find that particularly sad.

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal.

You know, we might've fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren't all bad.

Once or twice a week, make a giant pot of vegetable bean soup and use that soup for several days to limit cooking chores.

This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.

The shorter the chain between raw food and fork, the fresher it is and the more transparent the system is.

Food security is not in the supermarket. It's not in the government. It's not at the emergency services division. True food security is the historical normalcy of packing it in during the abundant times, building that in-house larder, and resting easy knowing that our little ones are not dependent on next week's farmers' market or the electronic cashiers at the supermarket.

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

Our animals don't do drugs. Instead, we move them almost daily in a tightly choreographed ballet from pasture spot to pasture spot.

Earthworms will dance

How many of us lobby for green energy or protected lands, but don't engage with the local bounty to lay by for tomorrow's unseasonal reality? That we tend to not even think about this as a foundation for solutions in our food systems shows how quickly we want other people to solve these issues.

I'm suggesting that criminalizing chemically fertilized grass in favor of unnaturally-fed corn is not a rational trade off.

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.

If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.

That ought to be our stewardship mandate, to create Edens wherever we go. That's why humans are here. Our responsibility is to extend forgiveness into the landscape.

People are not motivated by the bottom line. It's about the human factor—and purpose is the driver. It's what stirs our souls and inspires us to do great things over a sustained period of time." Capitalism for these organizations capitalizes on human enterprise, not performance metrics. On people, not consumers. On relationships, not transactions. And on becoming the best company for the planet, not just on the planet.

By developing products that make a positive difference in people's lives, companies can make the world a safer and better place. Whether

we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a "steady-state economy.