#sustainability

We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out. ↗

— Paul Newman

#environment #farmer #inspirational #sainthood #sustainability

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. ↗

— Albert A. Bartlett

#humanity #life #science #sustainability #sustainable-development

Manufacturers have long chosen plastic for their products on the basis of price and functionality., But creating a more sustainable relationship with plastics will require a new dexterity on our part. It will require us to think about the entire life cycle of the products we create and use. ↗

— Susan Freinkel

#sustainability #life

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

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

#future #science #sustainability #science

I actually believe 'Sustainability', as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it's this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multibillion dollar industry. ↗

— Brandon Boyd

#arteries #believe #bottled #concept #cultural

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. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#animal-rights #capitalism #ecology #sustainability #vegan

For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction. ↗

— Susan Freinkel

#sustainability #food

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#become #category #difficult #getting #more

We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will. ↗

— Jeffrey D. Sachs

#humanity-and-society #life #sustainability #wealth #life

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