Best 140 quotes in «sustainability quotes» category

Natural selection has a new aspect, one that is psychological denial. Such denial where the “individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, which he is apart, suffers”.

No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can't settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.

[...] obtenir la baisse de notre dépendance aux combustibles fossiles demande de la méthode et de la gestion, et non une croyance aveugle dans des objets techniques particuliers qui seraient nécessairement adaptés partout et tout le temps.

One of the most important things about permaculture is that it is founded on a series of principles that can be applied to any circumstance—agriculture,urban design, or the art of living. The core of the principles is the working relationships and connections between all things.

OUR SOCIETY IS CONTROLLED BY LAWYERS AND FINANCIERS "PROBLEM MAKERS WE NEED TO EVOME TO A SOCIETY LEAD BY CREATORS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS PROBLEM SOLVERS. SURELY WE WILL HAVE MORE INGENUITY COOPERATION AND PEACE

So imagine that fans of our products or services no longer simply consume and use them. Now we are creating a new opportunity for them to both participate directly in the development of the products but also benefit from a share of the profits too.

Strategic move will be well placed to create multiple blue oceans over time, thereby continuing to deliver high growth and profits over a sustained period.

sustainable," like "green" and "organic," is an easily corruptible concept that, not surprisingly, has been willfully corrupted by people who would very much like to sell you a hybrid SUV or an Energy Star-rated flat-screen TV with no money down and zero percent interest for 60 months. There is very little about agriculture that is truly sustainable. At its core, agriculture is a human manipulation of a natural process. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable? Probably so. Is there a version of agriculture that is truly sustainable and able to feed 7 billion people? Almost certainly not.

The energy and daring is to resist the noes, until the final yes has been achieved.

No connection is always easy or free of strife, no matter how many minutes a day we meditate. It’s how we relate to conflict, as well as to our differing needs and expectations, that makes our relationships sustainable.

No matter how big a company is, one has to always look at business basics.

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.

Only when we start to distinguish reality from fantasy that we can humbly, with eyes wide open, forge loving and sustainable connections with others.

On this World Population Day, I call on all with influence to prioritize youth in development plans, strengthen partnerships with youth-led organizations, and involve young people in all decisions that affect them. By empowering today’s youth, we will lay the groundwork for a more sustainable future for generations to come.

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.

Permaculture land-use ethics invite us to protect intact ecosystems where they remain and, where ecosystems have been destroyed, to help restore them. Permaculture design also suggests that we take care of earth while taking care of people.

Rather than flog yourself over a slip, embrace it as simply an integral part of the process of change. Punish yourself and you've just made a second mistake - because holding yourself to an unrealistic standard... is a pattern that can lead to defeatism. A shame spiral that can take you out of the game altogether. And the game is all about long-term sustainability over short-term temporary gains.

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it’s also more grounded & sustainable.

right now, sustainable fashion is a subculture, an alternative market. but i don’t think sustainability should be an alternative market. it should be the new normal. but in an industry that has thrived off the normalization of exploitation, it’s kind of like, what’s next?

Social entrepreneurship represents the opportunity to redefine the role of government.

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

STRATEGY, MERIT AND HARMONY CREATE SUSTAINABILITY!

SUSTAINABILITY EMPOWERS JUSTICE, SECURITY AND ULTIMATELY, HAPPINESS

Sustainability is best illustrated by those who sell food … just so they afford something to eat.

Taking measures to ensure stability could assure the long-term economic growth and welfare at a global level

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources.

The idea of unlimited growth... needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and... the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied. - E.F. Schumacher

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

The New Economy brings the need to tap people’s curiosity, quest for knowledge and understanding, in order to develop a sustainable society.

There's no doomsday scheme made specifically for mankind, only higher agenda and priority than human race preservation.

..the planet is just too small for these developing countries to repeat the economic growth in the same way that the rich countries have done it in the past. We don't have enough natural resources, we don't have enough atmosphere. Clearly, something has to change.

There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all these landscapes. We turn wild trees to standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. But every fish is different from every other fish. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember specificity is everything.

There is not a single ecosystem in the Universe that is "sustainable". The planets are not "sustainable". Our solar system is sustained chaos. The best Humanity can do is learn to ride the waves of uncertainty.

The vision of the ideal life that we've been taught in the West, which is gaining ever more purchase in China and India and elsewhere, feeds the system we need to undo. Go to school in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to earn money so you can try to buy happiness because your life sucks, then retire and die: this is not meaningful living.

These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.

TRUST AND FAIRNESS DEVELOP HARMONY

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.

TRUST RESULTS FROM MERIT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

[T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land? The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies.

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.

To be an effective organisation, the structure of the organisation must be willing to adapt to a network model, leaving the old hierarchy model behind. We see the efficacy of the network model daily in many areas of our lives, and this greatly challenges the old from-top-to-down hierarchical model that many organisations have a hard time letting go of. But I suppose at the end of the day, it is a matter of survival. Simply put, in order to survive, one must adapt and to adapt today, means to take on a more networked approach to doing things in organisations, groups, companies and even in society as a whole (including politics). So in other words, in order for society in all of its forms from big to small, to move forward strongly, it must adapt to a framework that sees itself as a network rather than a hierarchy.

Trust is built in many ways: by creating opportunities to share something of our lives and feelings, by encouraging people to argue passionately for their ideas and positions while still respecting their opponents' right to differ, by meeting responsibilities and building a track record of dependability, and by sharing risks together.

Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution.

Well, it's been obvious for centuries that capitalism is going to self-destruct: that's just inherent in the logic of system―because to the extent that a system is capitalist, that means maximizing short-term profit and not being concerned with long-term effects. In fact, the motto of capitalism was, "private vices, public benefits"―somehow it's gonna work out. Well, it doesn't work out, and it's never going to work out: if you're maximizing short-term profits without concern for the long-term effects, you are going to destroy the environment, for one thing. I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it's an infinite wastebasket―but at some point you're going to run into the reality, which is that that isn't true. Well, we're running into that reality now―and it's very profound. Take something like combustion: anything you burn, no matter what it is, is increasing the greenhouse effect―and this was known to scientists decades ago, they knew exactly what was happening. But in a capitalist system, you don't care about long-term effects like that, what you have to care about is tomorrow's profits. So the greenhouse effect has been building for years, and there's no known technological fix on the horizon―there may not be any answer to this, it could be so serious that there's no remedy. That's possible, and then human beings will turn out to have been a lethal mutation, which maybe destroys a lot of life with us. Or it could be that there's some way of fixing it, or some ameliorating way―nobody knows.

Weapons never stay in their boxes. Once a weapon has been manufactured, sooner or later someone will use it. If it were possible to bring about true and lasting peace by force of arms, then we should turn all our factories into weapons factories. But that is impossible. Even though it is difficult to try to bring about peace through inner transformation, it is the only way of establishing sustainable peace in the world.

We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

We are made of star material, and every atom of matter on Earth originated in the core of a star.

We need more environmental awareness and sustainability, sustainable living and sustainable working, in all fields or areas. We need to create a world of understanding, acceptance, respect, tolerance, compassion and consciousness.

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.