Quotes About Sustainability

America is number one in wind power.

You gotta give yourself oxygen before you can give it to anyone else. I have to put my own mask on first.

You can give people a fish; you can teach them how to fish; or you can create the conditions where people would teach themselves to fish.

There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture.

until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.

As individuals and as a culture, our ability to heal, transform, and evolve beyond this old defiling mentality is tied to our food choices more than to anything else. To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.

Most of us have little comprehension of the enormous amount of land devoted to growing grain to feed imprisoned pigs, cows, sheep, birds, and fish. Already, over 521,000 square miles of U.S. forest have been cleared to graze livestock and to grow grain to feed them. This amounts to more land than the states of Texas, California, and Oregon combined, yet it grows daily, with about 6,000 square miles cleared every year. This amounts to about 10,000 acres per day, seven acres every minute.5

Beauty is the vocation of the earth.

Many persons have of late left off the use of West-India sugar on account of the iniquitous manner in which it is obtained. Those families who have done so, and have not substituted any thing else in its place, have not only cleansed their hands of blood, but have made a saving to their families, some of six pence, and some of a shilling a week. If this, or a part of this were appropriated to the uses before-mentioned, it would abundantly suffice

As soon as we label something as "natural", we attach to it the powerful implication that any change from its current state would degrade and damage the way it is "supposed" to be.

T]he people of plenty were a people of waste.

Despite declining catches, New England fishermen continue to receive state and federal tax incentives that encourage them in some cases all but compel them to acquire bigger boats and to harvest the seas more intensively. Today the fishermen of Massachusetts are reduced to fishing the hideous hagfish, for which there is a slight market in the Far East, but even their numbers are now falling.

What do you call dumping 22,000 pounds of organic chemical waste into the Mississippi River every day? You call it "organic loading.

This point deserves repetition because it is so critical: The most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is to reduce the use of coal first and most sharply.

Fifth, in a world that's increasingly geared toward short-termism and instant gratification, a tremendous advantage can be gained by those who move consistently in the opposite direction

Sprawl is bad aesthetics; it is bad economics. Five acres are being made to do the work of one, and do it very poorly.

When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally, nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities.

Garden as though you will live forever.

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated. There will never be another setup like the one in which we thrived. Ruin it and we will have lost ourselves, and that is craziness.

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.

If we do something in the public interest which at the same time is profitable to the company, then this is, indeed, very good business," he said.

And what a tree took away a tree shall restore

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?