Quotes About Sustainability

In early 2013, I came across a speech by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and educator Leanne Simpson, in which she describes her people's teachings and governance structures like this: "Our systems are designed to promote more life.

our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

If we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we're at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy, which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas).52

the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy."48

Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered communities, this is it.

As the Guardian's George Monbiot puts it, our planet's resources can provide us with private sufficiency and public luxury, in the forms of wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks. The earth cannot, however, sustain the impossible dream of private luxury for all.

It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it's a myth

emissions while raising people's quality of life. We have only a decade.

Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests."14

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long.

The world does not have enough resources and energy to give everyone a life of consumer luxury. We could, though, improve everyone's uality of life in different ways.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.

The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it's the cheapest way to produce. So

This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things: corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

Encouraging the frenetic and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer be the system's goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive.

For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF

We are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absord their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture.

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

la crise du climat pourrait susciter un sursaut citoyen, une secousse venue de la base, capable de répartir le pouvoir entre les mains du plus grand nombre et d'élargir considérablement le domaine des biens communs, lesquels cesseraient ainsi d'être vendus au plus offrant, morceau par morceau.

In French, "decroissance" has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy intensive than growing it in warmer regions and shipping it by light rail.)45

Building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that. - Ed Ayres