Quotes About Sustainability

Gardeners slaughter no animals. They kill nothing. Fruits, seeds, vegetables, nuts, grains, grasses, roots, flowers, herbs, berries-all are collected when they have ripened, and when their collection is in the interest of the garden's heightened and continued vitality. Harvesting respects a source, leaves it unexploited, suffers it to be as it is.

Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society's own habitation into a wasteland.

Let's just say that if these scientist had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate.

Overfishing of the past fifty years has driven the population of large fish down by ninety percent. And climate change is acidifying and warming the waters, lessening its ability to hold oxygen, suffocating marine life. We are rapidly killing the seas beyond the ability to heal.

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance? For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?

A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, for such a society is a house built upon sand.

So, the world is fine. We don't have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That's what we need to think about.

just wading into Africa and telling the local people that they mustn't do to their wildlife what we've done to ours, and that we are there to make sure they don't, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining.

There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another.

We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day," Roosevelt said, "but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear - that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I've come to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly and the faces of children may be achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and the food we share, there will always be darkness in the world.

But all was not well; a creeping rot—environmental, economic, and social—had been undermining its society for some time and would eventually lead to destruction.

The problem is people establish a national park and think they've won the war. No way. That's only the first step—a battle in a longer war.

Don't neglect the future in times of plenty, for tomorrow you may need what you wasted today.

If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.

We zullen de koe melken maar we zullen haar niet slachten.

The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.

I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy.