#sustainability

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

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good. ↗

— Douglas B. Reeves

#good #lead #leadership #mandate #morality

If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order? We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails. ↗

— Susan Freinkel

#environment #plastic #sustainability #love

I finally understood that I couldn’t avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderful thing, a beautiful thing. ↗

— Andy Couturier

#environmentalism #green #japan #sustainability #beauty

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

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

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