#sustainability

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

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

Climate protection creates sustainability and jobs in the real economy - in construction, in the production of heavy machinery and in systems engineering. ↗

— Sigmar Gabriel

#construction #creates #economy #engineering #heavy

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

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine) ↗

— Wendell Berry

#economics #lies #sustainability #beauty

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world? ↗

— Derrick Jensen

#ecology #economics #environment #sustainability #dreams

We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom. ↗

— Jonathan Raban

#citizenship #inspirational #sustainability #architecture

The key ingredient to progress, to getting ahead, is to leave a foundation behind. ↗

— Dov Seidman

#business

Since stepping down as laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted an increasing fraction of my time to international issues. I am involved with energy, environment, and sustainability issues, particularly as they involve new energy sources free of greenhouse gases. ↗

— Burton Richter

#devoted #director #down #energy #energy sources