Quotes About Sustainability

industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

We have already reduced the number of malnourished people to less than a tenth of the global population

The Arthur D. Little management consultancy estimates that—based on a vehicle life of 20 years—the manufacture of an EV creates three times as much toxicity as that of a conventional vehicle. This is mostly due to the greater use of heavy metals.

Hydrolectricity is the largest modern non-fossil source of primary energy; the combination of relatively low cost, high suitability to cover peak demand, and the multi-purpose nature of most large reservoirs (they serve as sources of irrigation and drinking water, a protection against downstream flooding, recreation sites, and, increasingly, places for aquacultural production) should make it one of the most desirable choices in a world moving away from fossil fuels.

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, worldwide applications of nitrogenous fertilizers averaged about 110 million tons a year, and losing half this mass is releasing more than 50 million tons of the element (in reactive compounds, mostly as nitrates and ammonia) into the environment.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive.

More efficient photovoltaic cells would be most welcome because of their relatively high power densities: efficiencies close to twenty percent would translate to electricity generation rates between 20–40 W/m2, two orders of magnitude better than biomass conversion, and one better than most hydro and wind projects.

By 2020 there were some 1.8 billion air-conditioning units in operation, with more than half of them in just two countries, China and the US. But this is only a fraction of the potential total because among the nearly three billion people living in the world's warmest climates, fewer than 10 percent have air conditioning, compared to 90 percent in the US or Japan.

The greater the reduction of these fossil fuel–based services, the greater the need for the labor force to leave the cities to produce food in the old ways.

An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century.

An abundance of useful energy underlies and explains all the gains—from better eating to mass-scale travel; from mechanization of production and transport to instant personal electronic communication—that have become norms rather than exceptions in all affluent countries.

È stupefacente come quelle bestie riutilizzassero ogni cosa - cuoio, carta, stoffa, tutto ciò che era servito agli esseri umani serviva, tornava utile anche alle bestie. Solo la cosa più preziosa al mondo - la vita - veniva calpestata.

You can get by with decent People, Strategy, and Execution, but not a day without Cash. Cash becomes even more critical as the business scales up, since "growth sucks cash." The key is innovating ways to generate sufficient profit and cash flow internally, so you don't have to turn to banks (or sharks!) to fuel your growth.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

couldn't bear to eat anything that had once had parents.

We have this land because we worked for it, because no matter how hard life was, we stayed here. This land provided for us. It will

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

April 14 had been dubbed Black Sunday. Apparently three hundred thousand tons of Great Plains topsoil had flown into the air that day. More soil than had been dug up to build the Panama Canal. The dirt had fallen to the ground as far away as Washington, D.C.

Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.

Farmers are professional hopers.

Food, a French man told me once, is the first wealth. Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.

Sometimes they called themselves carbon farmers, knowing that it was carbon that was making their soils richer, moister, and darker.

if only 11 percent of the world's cropland—land that is typically not in use—improved its community of soil microorganisms as much as Johnson and his colleagues did in their test plots, the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil would offset all our current emissions of carbon dioxide.

The only solution was education, offering the chance of experiencing at first hand the land and traditions of their forebears and proving that one can and should coexist with the wild, in harmony … that one can, and should, learn how to utilize Nature without spoiling it, in