Parker Palmer Quotes

When you take on something like your footprint on the environment, you have to say, 'Where am I going to draw the circle around my level of responsibility and then where do I assume that others will take responsibility?'

Recycling helps make people feel involved, and in some cases can be useful. Although you've got to do careful life history studies of what you're recycling. If all you're doing is recycling - if you've got three automobiles, and 10 children, and a 7,000-square-foot dot-com palace and second home up in the mountains that has to be heated - the recycling isn't making much difference.

We know that if you have $20 million, it's better to buy a van Gough print than it is buy an executive jet, from the point of view of the environment. But when you start getting down, it's like the recycling question: What are things we can really afford to do, and how much pleasure do we get out of them? We haven't even started to have that discussion, and it's getting awfully late.

I'm just glad that on a budget like this I don't have to make any of those hard decisions because I feel it must be a real job to direct this, as there's so much going on.

Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world.

Now our biggest environmental problems come from our own actions, our own choices, rather than pollution produced by big business.

Ideal government would be a very boring job - it would be a matter of organizing a lot of utilities and keeping the wires together and the power plant and all that kind of stuff. It's not a matter of telling people how to live, it's a matter of making it pleasant for them to live. Government should be in the position of distributing food, stuff like that.

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough.

The times talk to us of so much poverty in the world and this is a scandal. Poverty in the world is a scandal. In a world where there is so much wealth, so many resources to feed everyone, it is unfathomable that there are so many hungry children, that there are so many children without an education, so many poor persons. Poverty today is a cry.

The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.

Why can't a state that launches cosmonauts into space provide enough eggs and milk for its city children during the winter months?

I remember Secretary of State [George] Shultz one day saying that America is an economic model for the world. I replied to him that America represents 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 30 percent of the world's energy. What if everyone in the world lives like Americans? Where do we get the energy for this standard of living?

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives -- the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.

Abortion is green! I think its irrefutable, but people don't want to hear that. For most people, having children is an instinctual, natural desire and the last thing they want to do is believe that it has any detrimental side, or if they do believe it, they think it's different for them because they live in a gated community or whatever the reason.

Americans are not gonna conserve. We're not gonna shift to smaller cars. We can't - we have big, fat kids.

American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. That’s what globalization is about: Find markets where you can.

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.

If you wear clothing, and put out trash you are using up resources that others also need BUT I can pay attention and I can do better. That I know for sure about me, my soul needs to try or I can't lay my head down on my pillow at night and even hope to sleep.

I'd like to see people, instead of spending so much time on the ethical problem, get after the problems that really affect the people of this country

A peculiarity of capital is that it cannot be employed productively without benefiting the community in which it is used.

Being vegetarian here also means that we do not consume dairy and egg products, because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.

There was no Marshall Plan for Harry Potter, no International Financing Facility for books about underage wizards. It is heartbreaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can't get twelve-cent medicine to dying poor children.

A book came out recently written by scientists and environmentalists that made me so angry. It said the only thing we have to worry about is big industry. Each individual who tries to make his or her own environment better is useless. I find this criminal, because then you have a billion people all saying, It doesn't matter what I do because I'm just one person. But if you turn that around and a billion people say, What I do does make a difference, then it will make a difference.

No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.

The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.