Gaylord Nelson Quotes

Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth

The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution

The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.

We know the problems, and we know the solution: sustainable development. The issue is the political will.

If we are going to carry on growing, and we will, because no country is going to forfeit its right to economic growth, we have to find a way of doing it sustainably.

My role is not to choose between safeguarding the economy and protecting the environment - it's about doing both.

We only have this one planet; we got to figure out how to live on it without destroying it.

In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done. ...With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume

Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?

The rewards that will flow from a successful shift to a low carbon economy are high. Neither governments nor business can afford to let these opportunities pass them by

To look at the climate crisis alone - and in my view this is an election where we're not just deciding what kind of a world we will be but whether we will have a world or not, going forward. And the climate crisis, for one thing, you know, Hillary [Clinton] has not repudiated fracking by any means, nor fossil fuels.

In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren't worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don't have a clue what they're doing.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

With the world's human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can't control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.

The Prime Minister of India, at a meeting that I co-chaired a few months ago, stated that any development that is not sustainable is not development.

We need a greening of globalisation.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.