Sustainability Quotes - Page 11

• The specific danger is us; we are rampant; this earth is our only friend; we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back.

  William Kittredge

  Environmental, Earth, Danger

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• I think that when you start your own business you have to be very clear on what you're passionate about and what your values are. I was very passionate about travel and I wanted to inspire other people. At the same time, I knew if I was going to start my own business, it was going to have to mirror my values, and I knew I was passionate about the environment and about sustainability.

  Omar Samra

  Thinking, Mirrors, People

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• Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Children, Hands, Should Have

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• Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

  Vaclav Havel

  Country, Responsibility, Order

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• A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments trappings of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.

  Vaclav Havel

  Responsibility, Civilization, Roots

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• When we conduct agriculture, we are, therefore, altering the ecological arrangement that was responsible for our genesis as a species. I think that this is the reason that this alienation has allowed us to see and regard land mostly as a resource. So we have created a problem for ourselves from the word "go," for land is not a resource any more than humans are resources.

  Wes Jackson

  Thinking, Land, Agriculture

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• The Christian message, like an ecosystem, is about process. In an ecological sense, the cross symbolizes a willingness to die so that the continuation of life might be served. Now we must extend our love to the unborn if we are to serve eternal life.

  Wes Jackson

  Christian, Ecosystems, Continuation Of Life

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• Let us protect our children; and let us not allow them to grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analysis without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Let us steer them away from the harmful chase after material things and the damaging passion for distractions... Let us educate them to stand with their feet rooted in God's earth, but with their heads reaching even into heaven, there to behold truth.

  Friedrich Frobel

  Children, Growing Up, Hard Work

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• It would be rash to conclude that, on balance, the environment of the globe as a whole is either deteriorating or improving, or that the survival of the societies we know depends upon filling a simple set of prescriptions. It is all too complex and dynamic, whether it involves managing greenhouse gases or Nile snails... The future condition of the globe's interlocking natural and social systems depends more on human behavior than on the further investigation of natural processes, however desirable that may be.

  Gilbert F. White

  Simple, Survival, Environmental

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• It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.

  Wendell Berry

  Spiritual, Thinking, Air

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.99, Counterpoint

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• The capitalist system only allows us to heap up waste. I would like to propose that the trillions of money earmarked for war should be channeled to make good the damage to the environment, to make reparations to the earth.

  Evo Morales

  War, Environmental, Earth

  "Material World: Evo Morales - A Call for Socialism?". www.worldsocialism.org. June 2008.

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• If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.

  Wendell Berry

  Environmental, Endure, Ifs

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.136, Counterpoint Press

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• Humans, like all other creatures, must make a difference; otherwise, they cannot live. But unlike other creatures, humans must make a choice as to the kind and scale of difference they make. If they choose to make too small a difference, they diminish their humanity. If they choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ultimately, they diminish or destroy themselves. Nature, then, is not only our source but also our limit and measure.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Choices, Humanity

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• 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

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• To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America - not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

  Michael Pollan

  Past, Oil, America

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• Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

  David Korten

  Cutting, Innovation, Environmental

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• Entranced by promises of a material paradise of limitless luxury, humanity has too long ignored the mismatch between the imperatives of our existence as living beings on a finite planet and the imperatives of the institutions of money that chart our path to the future. Created to build colonial empires in service to kings, global corporations are ill suited to the task of building just, sustainable, and compassionate civil societies that nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for the whole of life.

  David Korten

  Kings, Luxury, Long

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• But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.

  Wendell Berry

  Army, Cities, Miracle

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

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• But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel market forces, including innovation that's tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

  Bill Gates

  Government, Innovation, Environmental

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• Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

  Rowan Williams

  New Year, Real, Years

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• Since problems spill across borders, security anywhere depends on sustainable development everywhere.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Environmental, Borders, Border Security

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• Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Assessment, Agreement, People

  Message Of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI For The Celebration Of The World Day Of Peace, w2.vatican.va. January 1, 2008.

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• Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves. Nor must we overlook the poor, who are excluded in many cases from the goods of creation destined for all.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Mean, Men, Animal

  Message Of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI For The Celebration Of The World Day Of Peace, w2.vatican.va. January 1, 2008.

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• Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we came and towards whom we are journeying.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Taken, Mean, Responsibility

  Pope Benedict XVI's Message for The Celebration of The World Day of Peace, w2.vatican.va. January 1, 2008.

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• Preservation of the environment, promotion of sustainable development and particular attention to climate change are matters of grave concern for the entire human family. No nation or business sector can ignore the ethical implications present in all economic and social development. With increasing clarity scientific research demonstrates that the impact of human actions in any one place or region can have worldwide effects.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Impact, Environmental, Attention

  Pope Benedict XVI's Letter to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople on the Occasion of the Seventh Symposium of the Religion, Science and the Environment Movement, w2.vatican.va. September 1, 2007.

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