Quotes About Sustainability

Whether you're replacing one appliance that's seen better days, or many because you're moving or renovating, you probably know to look for the Energy Star label. That's good advice.

The way things are going, we are not too far from the day when it will take an hour's labor just to pay for the gasoline to get to the job.

To make a forty-inch fur coat it takes between thirty and two hundred chinchilla, or sixty mink, fifty sables, fifty muskrats, forty-five opossums, forty raccoons, thirty-five rabbits, twenty foxes, twenty otters, eighteen lynx, sixteen coyotes, fifteen beavers, or eight seals.

We Irish know how to make the most of the times of plenty, for sure enough they'll be famine again.

Executing and sustaining change requires a different set of organizational behaviors than those required for planning.

Whereas clarity and ingenuity are required for creating current and future state maps, focus and discipline are essential for successfully executing and sustaining improvement.

When we ask leaders and improvement professionals what the most difficult aspect to making change is, they nearly always say, "Sustaining.

We cannot empathize this enough: sustaining improvements begins with proper planning, followed by proper execution and management.

Health care is the No. 1 concern of small businesses and the status quo is untenable.

We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

But as we ascend to animals of high types, having faculties more efficient and more numerous, we begin to find that time and strength are not wholly absorbed in providing for immediate needs.

The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

I buy food and gasoline - that's it.

I just could not stand the idea of eating meat - I really do think that it has made me calmer.... People's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its calf isn't by, it can make you think a lot.

Especially in a world that doesn't need homemade anything.That's when we need homemade everything.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

Here's the conundrum: No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one.

The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth's minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who—probably sooner rather than later—will throw them 'away'.

At this point in human history, the movement that best describes the progress we need is coming into dynamic balance by moving into the Doughnut's safe and just space, eliminating both its shortfall and overshoot at the same time.

jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collase

We live now, says Daly, in 'Full World', with an economy that exceeds Earth's regenerative and absorptive capacity by over-harvesting sources such as fish and forests, and over-filling sinks such as the atmosphere and oceans.

The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,' said Milton Friedman back in 1970, and the mainstream business world willingly believed him.

Peter Victor, can we 'go slower by design, not disaster'? Or even—in the name of agnosticism —what would it take to design an economy that can handle GDP growth without hankering after it, deal with it without depending upon it, embrace it without exacting it?