Quotes About Sustainability

I've spent my life supporting myself.

I believe that companies, doing business in a responsible and sustainable way, can help raise the quality of life and standards of living in some of the poorest parts of the world

With a healthy environment all our lives are enriched - without it our lives are diminished. The environment is and will always be number one - One Life, One World, Our Future.

My object is to save the world, while still leading a pleasant life.

We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us in a web of death.

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.

I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.

Now that we're essentially an indoor species, walled off from the world of other life forms, we're divorced from the very domain that supports and sustains our lives.

The push for us to throw perfectly good things away and buy new things to replace them so that somebody else can get rich--an idea that goes against our own basic instincts and common sense--still holds us in thrall. We are married to a disposable economy dependent on waste.

We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.

Garbage has become one of the most accurate measures of prosperity in twenty-first century America and the world.

That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.

Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash.

No matter where you are, there's no getting over it, no getting away from it," he has said. "It's a plastic ocean now … We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.

Refuse. Because every time you say yes, you are inviting more to be made. You have created demand for more waste. So we refuse all of that.

Gluttony is, after all, one of the seven deadly sins, and it's not because it's associated with obesity, a threat to an individual's survival, but because it represents overconsumption to the point of wastefulness, a threat to an entire community. Today, a gluttony of consumption has become the norm.

Infrastructure eventually becomes obsolete, but education perpetuates itself as one smart generation teaches the next. In the United States and Europe, industrialization rarely encouraged education.

On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.

Destroying forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth's biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.

I believe that the ten billion people expected to be present at the end of the century will enjoy a far better quality of life if we conserve half of the planet for nature than if we consume nature entirely.

The International Energy Agency insists that somehow humanity must plan to leave most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves in the ground to blunt otherwise ruinous climate change, adding that "no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050.