Quotes About Sustainability

I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.

The destructiveness of the tar sands is not inevitable. But Canadians and Albertans have become too tolerant of the politicians who compromise the nation's energy security as well as the next generation's future.

I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.

Sex was a reasonable alternative to burning fossil fuels. Maybe she should teach it in class. Hey, kids, there is solar energy, geothermal energy, wind energy and sex. Ask your parents about that one.

The terraced slopes were a marvel of human muscle, a compelling demonstration of what China's giant workforce could accomplish over generations. Even so, many from their region had left farming for trade.

I eat a variety of foods like vegetables, fruit and beef for protein and iron.

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.

The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that's already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want.

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant.

Maybe there isn't a way," he said. "Maybe all we can do is wait and hope and endure for as long as we're able. The food will run out. Our bodies will fail. And the vine will do whatever it's going to do.

If you want longevity, you can't just bet on tradition; you have to continually invest in the future.

I will never stop learning. I won't just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there's no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I'll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.

On joining the aquarium community we all agreed to put aside our carnivorous ways to live off Professor Brown's fish food. Every one of us agreed! If we start to eat each other, what kind of life would that be?

much pollution as all 760 million cars on Earth.

Expiration dates for bottled water is actually for the bottle, not for the water in it.

The big challenge is, we have to constrain and mold our ambition level without losing the spark. The stuff I lose sleep over nigh is, how are we doing on this? We want to make progress as fast as possible without exploiting human resources. How do you move faster without killing people? How do you build a community around the project without losing design integrity? And how do we get on an arc that moves from benign dictatorship to more small-group democracy?

She wanted to live lightly on the earth, in harmony with its rhythms, all her senses keen and her mind alive and her spirit awake.

Since I could not forget the wounds to people and planet, could not unlearn the dismal numbers--of pollution and population and poverty--that foretold catastrophe, I would have to look harder for antidotes, for medicines, for sources of hope.

Fifty years ago, when the human population was about 3 billion, we were using about 70 percent of the Earth's annual capacity each year. That broke 100 percent by 1980 and stands at about 150 percent now, meaning that we need one and one-half Earths to regenerate what we use in a year. As the authors of this now annual study note, we have a total of just one Earth available.

So, for our own sake, let's know all the rules, not just those that pertain to our bodies. Only through wider understanding and application of these ecological rules will we control and have a chance to reverse the side effects we are causing across the globe.

The discussion about food doesn't make any sense without discussion at the same time of land, land use, land policy, fertility maintenance, and farm infrastructure maintenance.

I understand very well that politicians always have to bridge the gap until the next election, even if long-term dangers increase as a result. But as an economist, my time horizon is longer.

The climate is not tomorrow. The climate is a year off or maybe 10 years off. So we have to be really clear that we're solving the crisis of economic insecurity at the same time.