269 Quotes About Sustainability

I'd be stunned, shocked, and amazed if there were a human being on the planet in 2030.

We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.

The full costs of consumption beyond market prices are hard to determine and hard to see, and they are typically underestimated. The benefits of consumption, by contrast, are immediate and tangible, and they are typically overestimated, thanks in part to an enormous and enormously sophisticated marketing apparatus. This asymmetry contributes to our overconsumption.

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?

Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success - for sustainability.

Ending is better than mending.

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.