Quotes About Sustainability

Mankind, which has always been a part of nature, has reached a point where it is too much for nature to accommodate.

We need to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children.

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.

Beneath the surface of states and nations, ideas and language, lies the fate of individual human beings in need. Answering their needs will be the mission of the United Nations in the century to come.

Lonely is one of the adjectives people like Shane Claiborne use, alongside unsustainable, to describe the culture of adulthood they grew up watching.

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability.

To damage the earth is to damage your children. —WENDELL BERRY, FARMER AND POET

The compass of compassion asks not what is good for me? but what is good? Not what is best for me but what is best. Not what is right for me but what is right. Not how much can we take? but How much ought we leave? and how much might we give? Not what is easy but what is worthy. Not what is practical but what is moral.

The cat is the only animal without visible means of support who still manages to find a living in the city.

If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging--which ends up on the garbage dump anyway--and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty.

A gastronome who isn't an environmentalist is just stupid, and an environmentalist who isn't a gastronome is just sad.

Tal como as plantas, a amizade não deve ser muito nem pouco regada.

I think the new generation is much more demanding about respect for the environment than we have ever imagined.

Me: What will the Earth eat now that the humans are gone? Themroc: The Earth must become vegetarian.

To the High Heavens I praise the potato, and recommend planting it, eating it, and honoring it.

From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions of the earth!" -Isadora Duncan

Most cars on our roads have only one occupant, usually the driver.

Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away. Topsoil exposed by the disc plows turned to dust, and the dust began to eddy, roil, and lift on the wind. "Rolling dusters," they were called, or "black blizzards." There were fourteen of them in 1932. The year after that, thirty-eight.

Overall, becoming a carbon-neutral country would involve changes in our behaviour, but these are modest compared with the changes that will be forced upon us if we do nothing.

I believe that as women, we must commit ourselves to sustaining the progress made by our foremothers who fought so hard for women's equality and liberation.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere.

The amplification of our lives by technology grants us a power over the natural world which we can no longer afford to use. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live as if there were no tomorrow.

The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don't like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.