Quotes About Sustainability

Giving money to poor people is not a sustainable solution to poverty. So how do you help poor people? Do you instruct, plan and order their lives with expertise and lots of government, or do you get them freedom to exchange and specialise, so that prosperity can evolve? Friedrich

The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency.

In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.

The world's cities already contain half the world's people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world's land area.

In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4.

Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).

If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs

Whether the oil will last long enough is a different subject and one I tackle later in the book: briefly my answer is that substitutes will be adopted if the price rises high enough.)

Standing by while global warming happens is killing the Christ. Ecocide is a form of killing Christ.

So too have many other animals served us well over the ages. It was the use of livestock that first freed us from the chase, allowed man to settle and civilize himself, slowly rendering the hunter a useless and ever more ridiculous figures so engaged in what the name itself, game, implies.

Voluntary simplicity is at once joyous and altruistic. Joyous because it is not permanently plagued by the hunger for "more"; altruistic because it does not encourage the disproportionate concentration of resources in the hands of a few, resources which—were they to be spread evenly—would significantly improve the lives of those deprived of basic needs.

I'd never be able to keep this place if it didn't pay for itself," he said. "It's absurd for one person or family to own something like this, but here we are. Now it earns its keep by hosting weddings and events, film shoots, things like that. Spring and summer, Christmas and New Year's . . . those are the busiest times.

A nation that can't control its energy sources can't control its future.

This is the moment we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.

Negara yang tidak bisa mengendalikan sumber energinya, tidak bisa mengendalikan masa depannya.

Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.

Still, I couldn't help but connect the two events and consider the human costs of the world's dependence on fossil fuels: the number of people who each day were forced to risk lungs, limbs, and sometimes their lives to fill our gas tanks and keep the lights on—and generate otherworldly profits for distant executives and shareholders. I

was nice to know, as one executive assured us, that without the Recovery Act "the entire solar and wind industry in the U.S. would've probably been wiped out." That didn't stop me from wondering how long we could keep championing policies that paid long-term dividends but still somehow resulted in us getting clobbered over the head. —

You can't save trees by ignoring people

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.

To each living thing the Mother gave a temporary form that would eventually dissolve, back once more into the infinite churning a cauldron of potential, where matters and energies are constantly exchanger and recombined. She made the world an image of that uterine cauldron, so that every life form sustains itself by absorbing, decomposing , and assimilating other forms.