Fred Brooks Quotes

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

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

Sustainability can't be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.

Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.

We, the people, do have the power to stop the tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food.

The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

A lot of designers still have nostalgia for the past. As for the furniture in the future, I hope they use less of real wood. Conservation in wood is necessary.

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings - because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

There's this very vulnerable planet of ours with finite resources. Architects and designers have, I think, a fair responsibility for conserving energy and materials, and making things durable.

For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

The problem is not the oil, but what they do with the oil. The United States is the biggest spender of oil and of all the planet resources.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

The good Lord put oil and gas there for us to find and use, and we'd better do it.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

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

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

I don't like to talk about sustainability, because sometimes I see green buildings that don't appear any different from those in the past.