Quotes About Sustainability

The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold.

North of Kaan, half a dozen small cities improved agricultural conditions by lifting up entire fields and carving out rain-retaining terraces on dry hillsides. Kaan itself dug out a series of reservoirs, established neighborhoods around each one, and linked the ensemble with roads and waterways.

More than 80 percent of the world's energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.

all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground—in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.

Farmers learned to plant fallow fields with clover, which recharges the soil with nutrients.

For 167 days in 1925 two Polish researchers ate almost nothing but potatoes (mashed with butter, steamed with salt, cut with oil into potato salad). At the end they reported no weight gain, no health problems, and, improbably, "no craving for change" in their diet.

Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.

As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth.

A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once, including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jicama (a tuber), amaranth (a grain-like plant), and mucuna (a tropical legume).

Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Solar research had been the product of anxiety about fossil fuels. When the anxiety faded, so did the interest.

Beginning in about 1200 A.D., according to Woods, Cahokia's maize fields repeatedly flooded, destroying the harvests.

Farmers grab a few harvests, but the soil is not bared to rain and sun long enough to incur permanent damage. Switching from field to field to field, swidden farmers live in the forest without destroying the ecosystems they depend on: a supple, balanced harmony.

The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of the environment," Meggers said. "Any group that over-exploited their environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of things.

The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general "law of environmental limitation of culture." And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: "The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, "lots" of researchers believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.

More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

elegantly than Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. As Pollan observed, large-scale potato farmers now douse their land with so many fumigants, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides that they create what are known, euphemistically, as "clean fields"—swept free of life, except for potato plants. (In addition, the crops are sprayed with artificial fertilizer, usually once a week during growing season.)

Amazonians practiced a kind of agro-forestry, farming with trees, unlike any kind of agriculture in Europe, Africa, or Asia.

For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.