Quotes About Sustainability

We're reaching the point where the Earth will have to end the burden we've placed on her, if we don't lift the burden ourselves.

Every schoolboy knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which is true. But they did not use every part of every buffalo.

Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn't feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren't too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the conservationist Aldo Leopold had already warned of two "spiritual dangers" that come from not owning a farm: "One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Despite its growing scarcity and preciousness to life, ironically, water is also man's most misgoverned, inefficiently allocated and profligately wasted natural resource.

In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production," he

I'm not even much of a gardener—my contribution to the family garden consists mainly of compost.

the majority of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve these problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.

Humans perpetually fight, LeBlanc says, because they always outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment and then have to fight over resources.

I really enjoy not getting in a car and running errands on bikes.

Well, you go to Holland and everybody's on a bike - nobody would think to have a car.

Humans had to make do with what they could.

Oh, I see, you care about the world. You green little queen!

We should havest our sustenance, not beg for it!

You're here mainly because I hate to see waste. I like to create. I like to repair.

Customers want good value, but they care more than ever how food and clothing products are made.

If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they'd know how that fine salad got on their table.

A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something 'measured' and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven 'creativity.

long ago gave up a number of beekeeping practices conceived with the notion of making bees do certain things that seemed good from a human standpoint but which usually involved radically disrupting the hive. Instead, I watch the bees more, try to understand what they are doing and then see if I can work in a way that will be in keeping with their biology and behavior. I try to create conditions that will make them happy, and then leave them alone as much as possible.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. —Ursula K. Le Guin

Our society routinely steals from the future.

Love the Earth You Make Love On

In the annals of bad ideas, this is one for the hall of fame: trawling giant nets through water thousands of feet deep to catch thumb-size fish and wads of gelatinous tissue that nobody wants to eat, but that we could grind up to feed the farmed fish we're now being forced to breed because of our previous indiscriminate trawling with giant nets.

I think things like 'farm to table' are misleading. I think sometimes that becomes a pedestal or a soap box to get people into your restaurant but is not... it's almost empty in a way. I mean, my food comes from a farm, and I serve it on a table.