Quotes About Sustainability

the IPCC now spoke comfortably of consensus and endorsed those mysterious concepts of sustainability and energy that renewed itself. We even thought that this way somehow we could save the planet and grow richer as well, a more pleasing outcome than the uncomfortable truth.

it would take the Earth more than a thousand years to recover from the damage we have already done,

We as a civilization are all too much like someone addicted to a drug that will kill if continued and kill if suddenly withdrawn.

the health of the Earth, not the health of people, in mind. This is why it is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat.

six billion hungry and greedy individuals,

We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane is adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

Pasaulyje, kuris tampa vis labiau kapitalistinis, vienintelis b?das garantuoti kokios nors kult?rin?s praktikos ar gamtovaizdžio išlikim? - surasti j? komercinio panaudojimo b?d?.

The economy is now consuming the planet's available resources on a scale that rivals their supply while releasing its waste products back into the environment on a scale that greatly affects the major biogeophysical cycles of the planet.

While adverse consequences of 100 years from now are obviously less pressing than those of next year, if they are also of large magnitude and irreversible, we cannot in good conscience discount them.

In the beginning was corn, and all was good.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

With a fourth generation of nuclear power, you can have a technology that will burn more than 99 percent of the energy in the fuel. It would mean that you don't need to mine uranium for the next thousand years.

When they come to chronicle the decline of this civilization," he said, "they're going to wonder why we were debating flag burning, abortion, and broccoli eating instead of the fundamental issues of how we live and use the environment.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to shop for fish at Whole Foods, he'll be broke within the year.

Una sociedad se hace grande cuando los hombres viejos plantan árboles cuya sombra nunca verán

society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never see'.

When we burn fossil fuel for energy we are, in qualitative terms, doing nothing more wrong than burning wood. Our wrongdoing, if that is an appropriate term, is taking energy from Gaia hundreds of times faster than it is naturally made available. We are sinning in a quantitative not a qualitative way.

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy.

The problem was that whenever I considered "earning a living," I thought mostly about the "earning" and nothing about the "living.