#inability

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. ↗

— David Mackay

#environment #sustainability #money

Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#becomes #burden #century #creative #creative process

Japan is already a leader in energy efficiency, and it has a wealth of innovative technologies. We must put this expertise to use creating a model for growth and sustainability that we can share with the world. ↗

— Yoshihiko Noda

#creating #efficiency #energy #energy efficiency #expertise

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital. ↗

— Maurice Strong

#accounts #after #asset #capital #corporation

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? ↗

— Gene Logsdon

#country-life #culture #farming #sustainability #art

People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. ↗

— Ha-Joon Chang

#green #sustainability #change

That was the awakening, really; it dawned on me that this wasn't really very fair on anyone. On her. On me. On Sienna. But I wasn't willing to change anything, either. I was fiercely protective of my friendship with Sienna. I had fought for it, against my true feelings, for years. I had battled so hard to suppress my feelings, and succeeded. I could never let her go. ↗

— Jessica Thompson

#long-term-friendship #change

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. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#farming #husbandry #land #sustainability #art

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#gun #sustainability #western-civilization #civilization

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it? ↗

— Andy Couturier

#environmentalism #green #japan #sustainability #money