Yvon Chouinard Quotes

Design shouldn't have to take a backseat to sustainability and making things responsibly.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

For a product to really be sustainable, it's really got to deliver the goods for the end user. That drives the whole rest of the equation.

Everyone must be clear that business as usual is not an option. Most of us live in buildings erected long before we were born and our successors will have to live with the environmental consequences of the buildings we construct today. It is vital that we minimise harmful impacts for those who come after us

We don't need more recycling, we need a completely different system of closed-loop manufacturing, and no matter how many cans I crush, my personal actions at the consumer level are of very little importance in getting us there.

The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

Globalised manufacturing and procurement mean that a lot of high-polluting, heavy duty jobs are transferred to China. We will ask major companies, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft and IBM to put pressure on their Chinese suppliers.

We're manufacturing to meet the demands of our own people but, in the meantime, for the entire world as well, and that definitely put a lot of extra pressure on our environment.

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

Design needs a new relationship with the world, one that is more focused on our planet's needs.

Integrity is the distinctive Santoni trait. Their attention for the longevity of good product matches the widely-felt need for fashion that's less superficial and volatile.

Eating is an environmental act.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these attitudes cause. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.

Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.

Thanks to my effort in the last 40 years, there has been more paper and film wasted.

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.

If the choice is between cooking alive and wasting money unnecessarily I would rather waste some money, because long before we cook we are going to kill each other if we don't deal with climate change.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

We need to push ourselves to make as many reductions as possible in our own energy use first - and that takes time. But we must do this quickly - the climate will not wait for us.