Quotes About Sustainability

Indians are still making terra preta in this way, according to Hecht, the UCLA geographer. Hecht spent years with the Kayapó, in central Amazonia, watching them create "low-biomass" fires "cool enough to walk through" of pulled-up weeds, cooking waste, crop debris, palm fronds, and termite mounds. Burning, she wrote, is constant: "To live among the Kayapó is to live in a place where parts of the landscape smolder.

Let the Kayapó burn the rainforest—they know what they're doing.

Plots with charcoal alone grew little, but those treated with a combination of charcoal and fertilizer yielded as much as 880 percent more than plots with fertilizer alone.

Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

the hearts can be removed without killing the tree, but this takes more time).

I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt's day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries—exceed carrying capacity—and trouble will ensue.

The main thing, Ruby said, was not to get ahead of yourself. Go at a rhythm that could be sustained on and on. Do just as much as you could do and still be able to get up and do again tomorrow. No more, and no less.

For they were, in the first place, even down to the very poorest, a well-fed people, with fewer luxuries than we, but more abundant necessaries; and while beef, ale, and good woollen clothes could be obtained in plenty, without overworking either body or soul, men had time to amuse themselves in something more intellectual than mere toping in pot-houses.

Once we crack the problem of fusion, we have an assured source of energy for as long as you want to think about it. It will cease to be a reason for war or an influence on foreign affairs.

But there is a dirty little secret. Fusion is not clean.

a fusion power plant would produce a larger volume of radioactive waste than a standard nuclear power plant.

Fusion is a bit cleaner than fission, but it still presents a major waste problem.

Less obviously, concern for the environment is a luxury good. Wealthy Americans are willing to spend more money to protect the environment as a fraction of their incomes than are less wealthy Americans. The same relationship holds true across countries; wealthy nations devote a greater share of their resources to protecting the environment than do poor countries.

8. Embrace waste.

Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth's tropical forests will remain.

We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.

You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.

We need to find innovative ways to dramatically ease congestion, improve personal mobility, and cut energy use.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

We can't begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.

We try to turn buildings into landscapes - defying the idea of modernism which sees nature and buildings as two distinct elements.

Genetically modified foods are good.

We can grow crops less expensively because molecular manufacturing technology is inherently low cost.