Quotes About Sustainability

Because major change requires people across an entire organization to adapt, you as a leader need to resist the reflex reaction of providing people with the answers. Instead, force yourself to transfer, as Roosevelt did, much of the work and problem solving to others. If you don't, real and sustainable change won't occur. In addition, it's risky on a personal level to continue to hold on to the work that should be done by others.

The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that somehow bridges the hostilities—a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Granted, such an arrangement seems, at first glance, improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation itself.

And in garbage we find material proof that there is no plan for stewarding the earth, that resources are not being conserved, that waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society. This

About 80 percent of U.S. products are used once and then discarded.13

Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.

I'm not a vegetarian by any means; I eat fish. But the problem with shark finning is they catch the shark, cut their fins and throw them back in the ocean, and to me, that's wrong. If you're going to kill an animal, you should use the entire animal and do it humanely. I'm definitely not a big fan.

I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way.

My work is all about how we consume. To me it's important to know where things come from. Generally, our products today are so cheap, you know there's something wrong. Things are not made in a good way. I want to make things that are. I want to make the story behind products visible.

I like to bring people together so we don't waste opportunities and resources and keep doing the wrong things when we know better. Corporate America makes great things and things that can hurt us. They have to be part of the solutions. There's nothing to say you don't make a profit by doing good.

To shut off coal, or to say you can't have further coal development, I think is the wrong way to go.

Several groups have information evaluating seafood sustainability. I wrote the first such guide, and seafood pocket-guides and detailed evaluations of different seafoods are available for download from the group I founded, Blue Ocean Institute.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

You can sell nothing for a mark-up for a while, but only until something starts eating away at it. Now I can go home and click on Yahoo, call my sister and talk over a microphone for free.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

I grow my own vegetables and herbs. I like being able to tell people that the lunch I'm serving started out as a seed in my yard.

While cheap products are exported to western countries, the waste is dumped mostly in China's back yard, contaminating its air, water, soil and seas.

Yeah I guess I don't want to end up being one of those stories where the guy ends up spending more than he has and owes money to the IRS and stuff like that. I just want to be able to take care of my family and live modestly.

I'm still driving a Prius, yeah.

We've got to get off oil. And it's possible. It'll take a dramatic shift in the way we think and how our infrastructure works, but we as Americans have proven time and again that we can tackle change head on. Yeah, it's a challenge, but it doesn't have to be a painful one. We just have to recalibrate our thinking on the subject.

If we each take responsibility in shifting our own behavior, we can trigger the type of change that is necessary to achieve sustainability for our race or this planet. We change our planet, our environment, our humanity every day, every year, every decade, and every millennia.

Most people don't know that humans kill 100 million sharks every year, mostly for a really expensive soup in Asia.

Here you do have forests, where pigs could be raised by letting them root about in the forests for a good part of the year. Therefore, you have a different attitude toward them compared with what continues to exist in the Middle East.