Quotes About Sustainability

First is a reckoning on energy. It will probably never again be inexpensive to fill a gas tank. There is too little easy oil left in the ground, and there are too many people competing for it.

Anyone with faith in economic man would think that people would put up with the pain of a long commute only if they enjoyed even greater benefits from cheaper housing or bigger, finer homes or higher-paying jobs. They would weigh the costs and benefits and make sensible decisions. A couple of University of Zurich economists discovered that this simply isn't the case.

the obvious solution to congestion—building more roads—simply produces more traffic, creating a hedonic treadmill of construction and frustration.

low-rise, mixed-use buildings of two or three stories—the kind you see on an old-style, small-town main street—bring in ten times the revenue per acre as that of an average big-box development.

met in a harborside convention center in Vancouver to figure out how to save the world's exploding cities from disaster. The world had little inkling of the great recession slouching on the horizon, yet the prognosis was bleak. The problem? On the one hand, cities were pumping out most of the world's pollution and 80 percent

With about half the world's population, cities are responsible for three-quarters of energy consumption and 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the dispersed city is the most wasteful of them all.

The sustainable city has got to promise more happiness than the status quo. It has got to be healthier, higher in status, more fun, and more resilient than the dispersed city.

It means living closer together and sharing more spaces, walls, and vehicles. It means collecting experiences rather than objects.

A truly sustainable relationship between earnings and operating cash flow requires that the two measures grow at comparable rates over the long term. When their rates of growth depart, an understanding of the causes can provide insight into how that discrepancy might be resolved. Such insight will provide guidance on the direction of future earnings and cash flow.

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.

It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us to further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out, looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.

Desperation is unsustainable.

Unlike the Indians, who gathered branches for firewood, the first white settlers girdled the trees to clear the land. And the great forest began to dwindle. As they would everywhere they went, the settlers used up the land to the point where they couldn't grow enough food.

Progress is building something lasting for future.

I think half the trees in the world are felled to make up the IIT entrance exam guides. Most of them are crap

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.

Keith Wynn, @ravens_rhapsody

...there is no such thing as infinity in any of the natural resources of the earth.

Why are we destroying the land instead of taking care of it? It takes care of us.

Save the bees, the trees, and the Oxford comma.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them and see his fellows with impartial eye afar, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising — making earth bald before its time.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.

My idea of a perfect snack? A carrot, gently coerced from the soil, carefully wiped on my jeans, and eaten fresh.