Wendell Berry Quotes

The societies of consumption and squandering of material resources are incompatible with the idea of economic growth and a clean planet.

We want to bring better products to Vietnam. My hope is through changes in lifestyle and the products we consume, it will affect the people and change the way they are thinking.

If you're not buying recycled products, you're not really recycling.

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk.

The reality is that a consumer culture which chucks out its iPhones for a new version every nine months is completely unsustainable, because Earth has already reached the tipping point. 'The General Strike' attempts to personalize these issues and encourage listeners to look for a new model.

Our entire economy is based on waste. We produce stuff we don’t need… How far is this going to go? I have a 5 word answer for you: Zero waste equals zero commerce.

People mean well. But there is an unintended consequence of giving people bigger recycling bins and more opportunities to recycle—soon they want to recycle everything.

Our myopic focus on producing and consuming as cheaply as possible has created a linear economy in which objects are briefly used and then discarded as waste.

We face a simple choice. Either we go back to the days when everything was disposable and landfill dumps consumed our countryside at an increasing pace, or we recognise that we have limited resources and need to use them wisely and sustainably.

Sustainability is not just about adopting the latest energy-efficient technologies or turning to renewable sources of power. Sustainability is the responsibility of every individual every day. It is about changing our behaviour and mindset to reduce power and water consumption, thereby helping to control emissions and pollution levels.

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.

Every conflict is emblematic of the throwaway culture.

What is urgently needed is a bold new move from a consumer economy to a conserver economy in all of the developed countries, and particularly in the United States.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

I mean, if cans can be recycled, why not spirits?

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

When we unwrap presents, I tend to sit there with a bin liner trying to collect up the wrapping paper and thinking about which pieces I can reuse and which I will recycle.

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

We obviously want to produce things that people want. We are going to continue to do that in an environmentally responsible way, while still being aware of the physical, scientific, and practical issues that we have to deal with.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, cannot afford to continue assuming propriety over the world's resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it - not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.