Quotes About Sustainability

Teach a man to fish and he will eat forever. Give a man a fish and he will expect free tartar sauce.

we are partisan in favor of our own children and grandchildren, who we hope can live in a world that doesn't poison them when they drink the water, breathe the air, or make a living.

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.

Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.

The earth is warming at an alarming rate, we are running out of fossil fuels, and it is long past time for us to take action to correct these problems.

We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

By almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been. People are living longer, healthier lives. Many nations that were aid recipients are now self-sufficient.

By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof.

You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.

By 2025, 5 billion people will live in countries with inadequate water supplies. • Within 50 years all the world's great reefs may have been wiped out by higher sea temperatures.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

A single farmers' market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers' markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy

We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn.

the world in 2100 would have about 600 parts per million carbon dioxide. That is, we'd live if not in hell, then in some place with a very similar temperature.

Lincoln said that cultivating even 'the smallest quantity' of ground bred freedom and independence. 'Ere long the most valuable of all arts, will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression of any of its forms. Such community will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.

We hebben een vijand en zijn naam is Shell.

I think the system has met its match. We no longer possess the margin we'd require for another huge leap forward, certainly not fast enough to preserve the planet we used to live on.

Taken together, he said, these two lines of inquiry made it clear that the safe number was, at most, 350 parts per million.

Here's the Stanford University researcher Rosamond Naylor, who conducted some of the most recent calculations: "I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there's not going to be any place to turn."61 It doesn't get any more basic than that.

in fact American carbon dioxide emissions were expected to fall nearly 5 percent in 2009.47 Which is good news. Just not good enough. To give you an idea of how aggressively the world's governments are willing to move, in July 2009 the thirteen largest emitters met in Washington to agree on an "aspirational" goal of 50 percent cuts in carbon by 2050, which falls pretty close to the category of "don't bother.