Quotes About Sustainability

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she'd get an ovation.

To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

A country watches dumbstruck as New England's priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it. And with those words, she has her book's end.

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?

Someday we'll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

someone to speak for the trees." She

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment. Soon the world will be returned to the healthy intelligences, the collective ones. Colonies and hives.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

The secret of life; plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things.

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man ... Unless man .

If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you'll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century's soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can't even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.

NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY

Aly affirmait souvent - à moi, aux parlementaires locaux, à ses collègues, aux abonnés de son blog, à qui voulait l'entendre - que si une masse critique de gens, si modeste soit-elle, retrouvait la conscience du lien qui nous unit, l'économie deviendrait écologie.

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.