David W. Orr Quotes About Sustainability

• Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.

  David W. Orr

  Growing Up, Giving, Humanity

• For three decades and longer we have been developing the ideas, science, and technological wherewithal to build a sustainable society. The public knows of these things only in fragments, but not as a coherent and practical agenda indeed the only practical course available. That is our fault and we should start now to put a positive agenda before the public that includes the human and economic advantages of better technology, integrated planning, coherent purposes, and foresight.

  David W. Orr

  Technology, Ideas, Environmental

• Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity.

  David W. Orr

  Real, Issues, Water

• It is much easier to make intellectual messes than it is to clarify complicated issues, especially when real solutions would challenge the status quo and require much careful thought across many fields of knowledge. Problems of climatic change, biotic impoverishment, population growth, and the choices to be made by various technologies and the transition to a sustainable and decent society with an economy that works over the long-term are difficult, complex, and intertwined problems with many possible answers.

  David W. Orr

  Real, Technology, Issues

  David W. Orr (2012). “The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror”, p.53, Island Press

• No institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary transition to a sustainable world than colleges and universities. They have access to the leaders of tomorrow and the leaders of today. What they do matters to the wider public.

  David W. Orr

  College, Leaders Of Tomorrow, Environmental

• The dialogue about sustainability is about a change in the human trajectory that will require us to rethink old assumptions and engage the large questions of the human condition that some presume to have been solved once and for all.

  David W. Orr

  Environmental, Assumption, Sustainability

  David W. Orr (2012). “The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror”, p.58, Island Press

• The planetary emergency unfolding around us is, first and foremost...a crisis of thought, values, perceptions, ideas and judgments. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis of those institutions which purport to improve minds.

  David W. Orr

  Ideas, Perception, Mind

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