Sustainability Quotes

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Everybody wants to save the Earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

This urbanization that's taking place around the world is very real. But if it's people that are seeking an urbanized environment out of desperation, that's not going to be helpful long term.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

I think climate change is probably the most extreme, and it's been going on for years because it's very difficult to talk about a planetary issue like climate change and to get people who live within four-year electoral cycles to actually pay attention to something that you predict is happening way in the future.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

One generation plants the trees. Another gets the shade.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

The fruits [game and natural resources] may be easier tasted than believed.

To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

We're too many people; that's why we have global warming...on a voluntary basis, everybody in the world's got to pledge to themselves that one child is it.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

Natural gas obviously brings with it a number of quality-of-life environmental benefits because it is a relatively clean-burning fuel. It has a CO2 footprint, but it has no particulates. It has none of the other emissions elements that are of concern to public health that other forms of power-generation fuels do have: coal, fuel oil, others.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed

Vegetarian is the New Prius!

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

Energy powers our economy, both literally and figuratively.