Rachel Boston Quotes

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I'm home, I'm a pretty green fellow.

I'm a strong proponent of green tech for anyone who can afford it, having spent the last 40 years working toward achieving a smaller and smaller eco-impact for myself.

Now, if you're Al Gore, you can afford $10 a pop for squiggly-pig-tailed fluorescent light bulbs. But if you're mainstream America, two or three kids, mom and dad working outside the home, that's not a very good deal.

You can drive an SUV, but there's a balance. If you do that, maybe use energy-efficient light bulbs at home or just be conscious of switching off lights. If you can afford to drive an SUV, maybe you can afford to make a donation to a wind farm or plant some trees. It's all about balance.

I built the windmill 30 years ago in Tefen, and I think it was the right thing to build at that time, and I don't think that we did much with the solar or with windmills. Not much was done. I think we were too busy.

Most of the energy in North America is just consuming - Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices - or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas. We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy.

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing?

Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home.

Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great.

One action society needs to take is to use energy much more efficiently. Instead of incandescent light bulbs, you could switch to LEDs that consume a lot less electricity, for example.

I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, 'Well, how much energy do you use at home?' And I was embarrassed. I didn't actually know.

I try to leave a light footprint. I'm involved with Global Green, which aims to educate people about sustainable building and the greening of schools. I try to be aware about the consumption of unnecessary things in a consumptive culture.

With the right infrastructure in place, home solar will be recognized publicly as affordable, easy, and smart, and every new home built in the developed world can have clean energy sources built into it.

Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil.

In Los Angeles, I drive a hybrid and live in a very simple home. Anything you do from carrying a canteen of water to starting a recycling program in your office makes a difference. Reusing what you already have has always been green - from clothes to boxes to glass jars from the supermarket.

Shikun & Binui, our infrastructure and real estate company, implements sustainability by building their projects 100% sustainable while educating their employees worldwide.

What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

By 1990 I went back to no gasoline; I was just riding around on my bike, taking the bus. I had a tiny little electric car that didn't go very far or very fast. People thought I'd lost my mind. Even my own family thought I'd lost my mind.

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.

'Green' does not have to mean the sort of hair-shirt, wood-burning-stove sensibility of the '70s. Green can and should be sleek and modern.

It is possible for Japan to become the model of a society that does not rely on nuclear power.

You can pregrow a village with no consequence on the land. In fact, with a positive carbon contribution.

Sustainable development requires human ingenuity. People are the most important resource.

It's pretty obvious that Western lifestyles which rely on gigantic amounts of electricity use up far more resources than a subsistence-based life. A little more poverty would be a good thing.

Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.