Quotes About Sustainability

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

Beneath a world—in its rocks, its dirt and sedimentary overlays—there you find the planet's memory, the complete analog of its existence, its ecological memory. —PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

There are two kinds of people left in the world, consumers and destroyers. We used to have creators, but they all ran away.

What has been made all but impossible by the industrial system is that men and women can attain a livelihood by doing what is both aesthetically and morally sound and economically and practically valid, by a means that allows them both intellectual and spiritual responsibility.

We have been trained not to waste food in the garbage, but to waste it on our bodies. Either way it is wasted. In one way, we just carry the waste with us.

Sometimes it's hard to feel much hope for the planet.

In other words, we saved an animal from extinction just so we could start killing it again. How messed up is that?

finger mullet

Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.

If wildlife cannot exist there will be poor quality for human life. A better world for wildlife means a better world for human life.

Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.

The more humans fill the world, the more we empty it.

If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

Our technology has produced thalidomide, CFCs, Agent Orange, nerve gas, pollution of air and water, species extinctions, and industries so powerful they can ruin the climate of the planet.

Hiçbir uygarl?k, topluluktaki doÄŸumlar?n say?s?n? s?n?rland?rmadan y?ld?zlar aras? yolculuk çabalar?n?n üstesinden gelemez

Los seres humanos sólo pueden sobrevivir matando otros organismos. Pero podemos realizar una compensación ecológica cultivando otros organismos; estimulando la plantación de bosques, impidiendo la matanza al por mayor de organismos como las ballenas y la focas, organismos que pueden tener valor comercial o industrial, como asimismo declarando fuera de la ley la caza injustificada, y haciendo que el medio ambiente de la Tierra sea más agradable para todos sus habitantes.

It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.

No Green Revolution, no hydroponics, no making the deserts bloom can beat an exponential population growth.

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

When a massive failure to preserve the integrity of an ecosystem occured, no one escaped the consequences.

from nature what they needed to improve their lives without regard for how it might damage nature herself

to realize it leads directly to extinction. Sooner or later nature will have no more to give them.