Sustainability Quotes

"Treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children"
- Kenyan Proverb

"When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world."
- John Muir

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced"
- Kierkegaard

“Sustainable development is a dynamic process which enables all people to realise their potential, and to improve their quality of life, in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life support systems."
- (Forum for the Future Annual Report 2000).

“Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further developments."
- Lewis Mumford

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. "
Albert Einstein

“There are two posible routes to affluence. Either produce much, or desire little. "
- Anonymous

"If everyone on the world enjoyed the same level of natural resource consumption as a typical UK citizen, we would need three planets to support us. This is clearly unsustainable. "
- www.bioregional.com

"Uncommon men require no common trust; give him but scope and he will set the bounds"
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

"Commodities, including parcels of time, only accrue value if and when they are rendered scarce. Time scarcity has been a basic principle of industrial life."
Andrew Ross

"The wise man doesn’t give the right answers - he poses the right questions."
Claude Levi Strauss

"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

"He who would travel happily must travel lightly."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age."
Jacques Barzun

"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust

"Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on."
Kevin Kelly

"Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you."
Elias Canetti

"Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium."
Cyril Connolly

"Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table."
Alan Cooper

"If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough."
Mario Andretti

"Do less, with less."
Viridian Design Manifesto

"Some people say complexity is 'out of control'. But not knowing how to reach a destination is one thing — having no destination at all is another, more wretched, thing."
John Thackara

"For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."
Marshall Mc Luhan

"We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end."
Lewis Mumford

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
Franz Kafka

"Don’t follow trends - start trends."
Frank Capra

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world."
Albert Camus

"In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation."
Victor Papanek

"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further developments."
Lewis Mumford

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
Henry Miller

"A wise man changes his mind; a fool never will."
Spanish Proverb

"If you want to build a ship, teach the men to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Saint Exupery

"We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people."
- Mikhail Gorbachev

"We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures."
- The Dalai Lama

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
- Albert Einstein

"We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to."
- Terri Swearingen

"Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."
- Aldous Huxley

"The best friend of earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth."
- Frank Lloyd Wright

"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
- Galileo

"You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled."
- Tahanie

"We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin."
- Leif Johansson

"We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us. "
- E.F. Schumacher

"Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'."
- Luther Standing Bear

"If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed."
- Chinese Proverb

"The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years."
- Jacques Cousteau

"Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food."
- Hippocrates

"If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wastefull. A far better way would be to avail ourselves of the sun's rays."
- Nikola Tesla

"We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial. "
- Ted Turner

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mahatma Gandhi

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
- Marshall McLuhan

"We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking."
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Indian Prophecy

"The continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation."
- UN Environment Program

"A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent."
- E. F. Schumacher

"Everyone who considers themselves a realist will be forced to justify their behavior in light of their contribution toward the preservation of the environment."
- Ernst von Weizacker

"For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful."
- Buckminster Fuller

"The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring and thus more intelligent, even competitive."
- Paul Hawken

"We have forgotten who we are, we have lost our sense of wonder and connectedness, we have degraded the earth and our fellow creatures, and we have nowhere else to go . . . "
- Earth Charter

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
- Thomas Edison

"The boundless blue-sky, the ocean which gives us breath and protects us from the endless black and death, is but an infinitesimally thin film."
- Vladimir Shatalov - Cosmonaut

"The only people in the suburbs who like what's happening are the developers, who are getting rich. "
- Myron Orfield

"Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment."
- Rene Dubos

"Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something."
- Carl Sagan

"That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted. "
- Egyptian tomb inscription

"If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror."
- John Young, former Apollo astronaut

"Human history becomes more a race between education and catastrophe."
- H. G. Wells

"The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. "
- Frank Lloyd Wright

"The time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"Our world has enough for each person's need, but not for his greed."
- Mahatma Gandhi

"We all moan and groan about the loss of the quality of life through the destruction of our ecology, and yet each one of us, in our own little comfortable ways, contributes daily to that destruction. It's time now to awaken in each one of us the respect and attention our beloved mother deserves."
- Ed Asner

"The world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War."
- Mikhail Gorbachev

"Out of clutter ... find simplicity. From discord . . . find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. "
- Albert Einstein

"Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the people of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it."
- Chief Seattle

"Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man."
- Stewart Udall

"The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done -- challenging us to a realization of a new humanity. "
- Jean Houston

"Less is more."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"We are each as much a part of the environment as a tree is. The ecosphere is an interconnected web (like the Internet)."
- Matt Howes

"Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge. "
- Thomas Edison

"The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. "
- Luther Standing Bear

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

_
52 would be female
48 would be male
_
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
_
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
_
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
_
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from
the United States.
_
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

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When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.