Sustainability Quotes - Page 9

• I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Compassion

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• How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Meaningful, Views, Broken

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

  Cameron Sinclair

  Survival, World, Buzz

  "Quotes of the day: Cameron Sinclair". www.cnn.com. July 11, 2008.

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• Every candidate running for president has got to answer the following very simple question: At a time when we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainability, should we continue to give $135 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade to fossil fuel companies?

  Bernie Sanders

  Running, Simple, Giving

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• The kind of capitalism we are seeing today under this expansion of property into living resources is a whole, new, different phase of capitalism. It is totally inconsistent with democracy as well as with sustainability. What we have is capital working on a global scale, totally uprooted, with accountability nowhere, with responsibility nowhere, and with rights everywhere. This new capital, with absolute freedom and no accountability, is structurally anti-life, anti-freedom.

  Vandana Shiva

  Responsibility, Rights, Accountability

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Unique, Talking, Numbers

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

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• There can be no solution to the challenge of climate change that is not global. But if we can come together in partnership, we can transform today's challenge into tomorrow's opportunity - an opportunity for green growth and sustainable prosperity... we also need a strong bottom-up push from academics and opinion-shapers such as you. Universities such as yours are founts of ideas and innovation. They are furnaces of innovation and entrepreneurship. So, send forth this word.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Strong, Opportunity, Ideas

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• When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.

  Helene D. Gayle

  Children, Thinking, Ecosystems

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Love in truth-caritas in veritate-is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development. Only in charity, illumined by the light of reason and faith, is it possible to pursue development goals that possess a more humane and humanizing value.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Light, People, Giving

  Pope Benedict XVI (2009). “Charity in Truth”, p.18, Ignatius Press

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• To sustain an environment suitable for man, we must fight on a thousand battlegrounds. Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Fighting, Men, Rivers

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1967). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1966”, p.202, Best Books on

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• 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

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• Many years ago, I started a foundation [Wayuu Taya Foundation] to help improve the life of Latin American indigenous people, providing them with food, medical attention, education, and also focusing on sustainability.

  Patricia Velasquez

  Latin, Years, People

  "Patricia Velasquez - Supermodel, Actor and Author". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, nicheandnook.com. October 3, 2015.

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• It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.

  Vandana Shiva

  Agriculture, Care, Complexity

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• We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

  Paul Hawken

  Healing, People, Suffering

  "You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring" by Paul Hawken, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 2, 2014.

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• We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension.

  Wes Jackson

  Character, Simple, Soul

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• I just sang, recently, for the Prime Minister of Bangladesh - the 34th most powerful woman in the world, according to Forbes Magazine. The United Nations had an event where her son got an award and they put me on this special program on competitiveness and sustainability, and we're talking about doing a world tour of me and the music.

  Robert Davi

  Powerful, Son, Talking

  "INTERVIEW: Actor Robert Davi On His Frank Sinatra Tribute, His Hamptons Roots, "Davi’s Way" And More". Interview with Nicole Barylski, www.hamptons.com.

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• All too often we fail to ask what we are trying to sustain. Ultimately, sustainability must be measured by the endurance of thriving human communities.

  Barton Seaver

  Community, Trying, Endurance

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• A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.

  Vandana Shiva

  Thinking, Self, Roots

  Source: scottlondon.com

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• Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Heaven, Soul

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

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• [If] we can celebrate that in a way that celebrates our love for New England as well as our love for the Italian culture as well as the American culture, then we've done something that's really good and supporting these fishermen who are doing the right thing in sustainability . . . paying attention to make sure we don't overfish our world.

  Mario Batali

  Italian, Our World, Culture

  Source: www.popsugar.com

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• You have to be able to sustain life. So moments are going to be lighter, but moments are also going to be heavier. I think just the understanding that life goes in a million different directions, and hopefully, if you find excitement by what these characters are experiencing and what they're living through, and you're impacted by them as human beings, then that's the sustainability of the show [This is Us].

  Milo Ventimiglia

  Character, Thinking, Understanding

  Source: www.assignmentx.com

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• I am interested in the political economy of institutional power relationships in transition. The question is one of "reconstructive" communities as a cultural, as well as a political, fact: how geographic communities are structured to move in the direction of the next vision, along with the question of how a larger system - given the power and cultural relationships - can move toward managing the connections between the developing communities. There are many, many hard questions here - including, obviously, ones related to ecological sustainability and climate change.

  Gar Alperovitz

  Moving, Community, Political

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Graciousness, courtesy, compassion-this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on.

  Richard J. Foster

  Animal, Compassion, Oxen

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• I often quote an African proverb that says: "The world is not ours, the earth is not ours, It's a treasure we hold in trust for future generations." And I often hope we will be worthy of that trust.

  Kofi Annan

  Environmental, Generations, World

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• I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I don't want any encounters with the disenfranchised. I want to say it's not my fault. But it is, it's yours and mine, and ours. We'd better figure out ways to spread some equity around if we want to go on living in a society that is at least semi-functional. It's a fundamental responsibility, to ourselves.

  William Kittredge

  Responsibility, Thinking, Environmental

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