Quotes About Sustainability

We don't burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone's rear end a long time ago.

If you buy an SUV, you're buying your safety at the expense of someone else's." ... If you're driving a Hyundai, which basically runs on air and tofu, and you get in an accident with an SUV, are you going to say, "Well, at least I have the courage of my convictions?" Hell, no. You're going to say: "Soon's I get outta this hospital bed and find my legs, I'm gonna get me a Suburban. Loaded.

We know we cannot be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them -- exploiting animals in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food.

Action without compassion is like planting a dead tree. It will never grow. But any action that contains compassion is planting a living tree that grows endlessly and never dies. Or even if the tree dies, it always leaves a seed behind, which will grow into another tree. That organic quality of compassion goes on and on and on.

They dump their bulky backpacks, weighed down with tools, food, poisonous chemicals, plastic piping, and tents, and begin cutting trees and clearing the ground, manually and with herbicides. Then they set to work laying out waterlines, building check dams, and digging into the soil before planting thousands of cannabis seeds.

Safe yield in West Texas has long been abandoned for economic growth.

How slender is the accommodation which nature has provided for man.

food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half—since the days of Pithole—about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.

Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

I and my husband have enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we think, here, is how to live. That is the subject WE think of, and it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads concerning others. I think for others? No, no.

Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature.

We have to appeal to what moves us: the love of our beautiful planet.

We are realizing our own inseparability from each other and from the totality of all life. Usury belies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self at the expense of something external, something other.

We must turn away from an attitude of nature-as-engineering-object to one of humble partnership.

Through a million little choices every day, we are cashing in the earth.

The electricity you use at home each day requires 250 gallons of water per person, not just more than the actual water you use at home in the kitchen and the bathroom but two-and-a-half times more.

We want clean air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world. Yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.

Who better than Wal-Mart, after all, to make a kilowatt of electricity go twice as far, or a gallon of fuel move our trucks move three times the distance?" -Wal-Mart ad

Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.

Versteht sich, muß er sie bezahlen !" sagte er sich; aber er konnte schon wissen, daß er seinen Söhnen nie etwas zurückforderte und daß sie ihm nie etwas zu erstatten begehrten. Das ist Eltern gesund und läßt sie zu hohen Jahren kommen, auf daß sie erleben, wie ihre Kinder wiederum von den Enkeln lustig geschröpft werden, und so geht es von Vater auf Sohn und alle bleiben bestehen und haben guten Appetit.

Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world.

Solution 2: Don't let your blinky light blink. By keeping it on steady mode, you'll use up the battery faster, but you'll be around to buy more. Don't be cheap and dead.