Quotes About Sustainability

Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.

Who needs Russian gas if we could get all the heat we need from our own surplus? Who needs Middle Eastern oil, when we can integrate limitless renewable sources in our smart grids?

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

My biggest surprises in my everyday job have to do with the challenges of trying to be slightly more responsible as a brand.

As the Cherokee hunted and foraged in these mountains, they always stepped lightly, paying homage to the plants and animals that sustained them.

Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.

I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home.

The free-range chickens and Priuses are great, but they alone aren't adequate tools for creating a truly different society and ecology.

Marble lasts, but soil feeds.

The feminine is the feeling part of us, our deepest intuition, our sense of community and connection. Additionally, it is a sense of spiritual morality and consciousness. The feminine is life. It may shock you to hear that she does not care about production, accomplishment, domination, assertiveness, or winning. Those are masculine values. On the contrary, she favors enjoyment, inclusion, surrender, and sustainability.

WE KNOW THAT to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival. As individuals and nations are becoming increasingly interdependent, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility.

Once the moon gets to be full somebody - some man or other - goes up every day and slices bits of one side until there isn't any more,and then after a bit a new one grows. Men do that with all sorts of things, actually - rose bushes for instance.... The man who slices the bits off brings them down here and then they're used for making those lights on the cars. Clever isn't it... They only last about one night, I should think, because you hardly ever see them shining by day.

Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish

The end of economic growth does not necessarily mean we've reached the end of qualitative improvements in human life.

Despite their economic advantages, specialization and globalization in some ways reduce resilience — a quality that is essential to our adapting to the end of growth.

climate change is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant

Is recycling to do with global warming? - Need you ask? - Well, I only ask because we've been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.

The heap of dirty dishes was normal for Arthur, who had applied for a reduction in his water rate on the grounds that he washed up only every fortnight, and then used the leftover liquid for watering his roses.

Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too

We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune.

The handful of swamps left in America were probably some of the few remaining places on the continent where a man could live wholly sustained by the land, whether it was for food, shelter, medicine, or some of the cleanest drinking water on earth. Jeffrey wondered how long it would be before they were all completely destroyed.

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity