Sustainability Quotes

“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”
― Terence McKenna

“Ending is better than mending.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
― Paul Newman

“People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.”
― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

“To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“The pressure of adversity is the most powerful sustainer of accountability. It's as though everything you do is multiplied by 50 in order to surpass those with a head-start. I was never capable of slacking when at the threshold of failure.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
― Albert A. Bartlett

“Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps full the dinner pail is valuable.”
― George Washington Carver

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Live at home”
― George Washington Carver

“We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs

“The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)”
― Wendell Berry

“Consume less; share better.”
― Hervé Kempf

“All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The more stitches, the less riches.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.

And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“Love tames the benumbed beast. A man is put to use regarding a woman's physical safety, but a woman is put to use regarding a man's mental safety.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people.”
― Steven M. Greer

“If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough.”
― Catherine Friend, Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat

“This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.”
― David Mackay, Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air

“If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?

We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

“Go and be fish again.”
― Ernest J. Gaines

“We need to spread more seeds and fill this Planet with love to be surrounded by flowers just everywhere! It starts by simply opening up our hearts and hands to one another. It's in simple things where true Happiness may flourish.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job

“The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.”
― Jeffrey D. Sachs

“Manufacturers have long chosen plastic for their products on the basis of price and functionality., But creating a more sustainable relationship with plastics will require a new dexterity on our part. It will require us to think about the entire life cycle of the products we create and use.”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

“Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had a growth schema with only two factors of production—natural resources and labour—with no allowance for technical progress, capital formation, or gains from international specialization. In 1798, he portrayed the general situation of humanity as one where population pressure put such strains on the ability of natural resources to produce subsistence that equilibrium would be attained only by various catastrophes. His influence has been strong and persistent, largely because of his forceful rhetoric and primitive scaremongering…He would have been very surprised to discover that Britain in 2003 would have only 1.2 per cent of its working population in agriculture and a life expectation of 78 years.”
― Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History