Quotes About Sustainability

For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.

A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

The climate issue is for the state. It is an obligation for all governments.

We all have an obligation to pass on a better environment to our kids.

If you burn out you aren't doing your customers or your investors or your employees any favors. You need to create a situation inside your company where you are going to be retained for a long time. I think that's your obligation if you're good.

It looks to me to be obvious that the whole world cannot eat an American diet.

The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.

Later, I found it too hard to give up, and so I've continued eating fish and other seafood, while trying to ensure it's sustainably sourced. This means I'm now one of those vegetarians I used to frown at - one who occasionally eats fish.

Corn occupies a really special role in what I've been calling American agro-economics.

We don't know if soil is an organism or a matrix or what-the-heck-is-this-thing, and yet when we put seed into it, it can support life.

I know for sure that you cannot give to everyone else and not give back to yourself. You will end up empty, or at best, less than what you can be for yourself and your family and your work. Replenish the well of yourself, for yourself.

Food Tastes Better When It's Got Some Dirt in It

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

We're an ecological disaster. Exactly, said the expendable.

must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it.

we must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.

he who will not economize will have to agonize

Should I ration the lavatory paper, do you think, sir,' Finch said, 'or put up notices asking everyone to conserve?

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this. [ Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction , New York Times, April 19, 1992]

What you wants with these goats anyway? Little or nothin. Good fresh milk. God's best cheese. You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats.

The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don't reproduce. Don't consume. Don't trample the earth or you'll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven't gotten there?

They laughed, and they started making steak for dinner, or sausage, although, because of the kind of people they were (insufferable people, Nell thinks now), it had to be grass-fed or free-range or organic. And not too frequent.