Quotes About Sustainability

Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.

Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return ship to England? Absolutely not! They traveled to the New World to settle. And that's what I hope we will be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustainable environment.

The plastic your people made was strong stuff. We find so much of it now - I wonder if it will outlast us entirely.

I understand why there's still so much plastic in the world, still pale fragments of who-know-what-it-once-was washing up on the beaches, or just junk slowly weathering away like all the seats in the stadium. If you'd tried to burn it all on a rubbish heap, you'd have choked the world to death.

Most cross-institutional change processes fail because they miss the starting point: co-sensing across boundaries. We need infrastructures to facilitate this process on a sustained level across systems. And because they don't yet exist, organized interest groups go out and maximize their special interests against the whole, instead of engaging practitioners in the larger system in a process of sensing and innovating together. As

the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us survive into the future.

Every new source from which man has increased his power on earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee.

Think globally and act locally.

We recycle, don't we, Alex? And we replaced all of our lightbulbs. You know, with the ones that don't work very well? And one of my cars is a Prius. It's not like I don't care.

Ethanol uses more energy to produce than it generates, and it deprives the Third World of corn to eat, but the politicians and the agribusiness firms benefit. And

So we take infinitesimal little actions like preventing oil exploration, or recycling our beer cans, or driving hybrid cars that cost twenty-five times what a Third World worker makes in a year, or shaming other people for their desire to live well and prosper . . .

He plants trees to benefit another generation.

Control that's acquired without career capital is not sustainable.

In which I argue that a mission chosen before you have relevant career capital is not likely to be sustainable. Mission

The country that manufactures nothing, ran the old saying in such towns, eventually becomes nothing;

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.

Crop rotation and contour plowing require no additional capital equipment and would contribute significantly to productivity. By raising grain storage bins a few inches above ground, a large amount of grain spoilage could be avoided. Although such changes may sound trivial to people of advanced nations, the resulting gains in productivity might mean the difference between subsistence and starvation in some poverty-ridden nations.

We walk a ways to a McDonald's. I'm suddenly ravenous, hungry for something that is not vegetarian or organic or healthy but is bred in a daily misery.

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade, through high school.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world.

Grass isn't greener on the other side. Grass is greener when you water it.

It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end.

It's like the free puppy," I continue. "It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end." Chris cracks up. "Yes, exactly! They'll say, 'The puppy can't quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It's just a simple matter of coding, right?