Quotes About Sustainability

A Green Song (to sing at the bottle-bank) One green bottle, Drop it in the bank. Ten green bottles, What a lot we drank. Heaps of bottles And yesterday's a blank. But we'll save the planet, Tinkle, tinkle, clank! We've got bottles - Nice, percussive trash. Bags of bottles Cleaned us out of cash. Empty bottles, We love to hear them smash And we'll save the planet, Tinkle, tinkle, crash!

one planet doesn't matter.

If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.

the forces of power, particularly corporate power, are impatient with what is adequate for a coherent community. Because power gains so little from community in the short run, it does not hesitate to destroy community for the long run.

As we search for a less extractive and polluting economic order, so that we may fit agriculture into the economy of a sustainable culture, community becomes the locus and metaphor for both agriculture and culture.

Cavemen and dinosaurs didn't know what sustainable development was.

Our presence is not inherently evil and undesirable; it just has to be at the right scale, speed, and design. We can be an expression of biodiversity as worthy as any other species with whom we have co-evolved; we have a place and a vibrant role to play in ecosystems. It is our wild excess of procreation, ill-considered consumption priorities, and unbridled frenzy of activity that drowns the possibilities and existence of individuals from other species. That is where we have gone wrong.

Adam switches from a gas-guzzler of 12 mpg to a slightly less voracious guzzler that runs at 14 mpg. The environmentally virtuous Beth switches from a 30 mpg car to one that runs at 40 mpg.

Which is better, to cover the earth with a carpet or to put on shoes?

Businesses that don't do something valuable for others do not survive and should not survive. Profit is a way to measure how useful a business is. That doesn't ever change.

Dams are built with the intent of a 100-year lifetime — just long enough for societies to become completely dependent on them

If we treat our forests right, we can at least ameliorate the declines in forest extent and diversity and the consequent impoverishment of the aesthetic, economic, climatic, and spiritual benefits we count on from them.

In planting trees, aim to perpetuate an ecosystem, not a plantation.

The point I am making is that most of that extra consumption you fear will destroy the planet is not actually going to come from what you can claim to be surplus consumption, the hair gel and the jacuzzis. It will come from the provision of basic services that no one can call over-consumption. And we need to confront those, since they are a lot harder to curb.

Podem ir caçar, mas não se esqueçam de que nossa tradição nos lembra de abater apenas os seres da natureza suficientes para alimentar nosso corpo. Ninguém deve sacrificar um baripnia [parente] por esporte ou por prazer. Cada ser é nosso baripnia e devemos sempre respeitá-lo.

cada ser da natureza, inclusive o homem, precisa compreender que seu lugar na natureza não é ser o senhor, mas um parceiro, alguém que tem a missão de manter o mundo equilibrado, em perfeita harmonia para que o mundo nunca despenque de seu lugar.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

Commercially raised chickens are also kept confined in cages and fed on denatured feed contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides. Chinese physicians have always recommended 'earth chickens' (tu-jee) as the only safe dietary source of chicken and eggs. Called 'free-range chickens' in the West, they run free around the farm, eating wild vegetation, insects, and worms, and getting plenty of fresh air and exercise.

They arrived in Copenhagen aboard private jets and roared through its quaint streets in armored limousines powered by internal combustion engines. Perhaps one day the oil would run out and the planet would grow too hot to sustain human life. But for now at least, the extractors of fossil fuels still reigned supreme.

If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second.

Count among Washington's gifts to his future nation his revelation that cows, rather than horses or sheep, provide the most potent dung.

What would normally be good news instead laid bare a pesky side effect of innovation: greater efficiency required fewer workers, leaving rural communities with little to support themselves.

By 2050, natural gas demand is estimated to be 60 percent higher than it is today.

Every business needs a core strategy to be what I call always on the improve , for us it's constant, gentle pressure.