Sustainability Issues Quotes

Economists are very good at saying that something cannot go on forever, but not so good at saying when it will stop.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.

Not every town can or should be saved.

Population growth makes mitigation of and adaptation to climate change initially harder and ultimately impossible to solve. As long as the UN process ignores this, it will be running up a down escalator, and will ultimately fail

If surface water can be compared with interest income, and non-renewable groundwater with capital, then much of the West was living mainly on interest income. California was milking interest and capital in about equal proportion. The plains states, however, were devouring capital as a gang of spendthrift heirs might squander a great capitalist's fortune.

We're still expecting capitalism to solve problems: 'Maybe if we sell enough oil, we can give some profits to an environmental agency!' Capitalism isn't a moral system.

The brutal reality is that newer, more sprawling suburbs - and especially the cheap boom-years exburbs - aren't just a bit unsustainable, they're ruinously unsustainable in almost every way, and nothing we know of will likely stop their decline, much less fix them easily.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.

We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.

Airport expansion is just one example of how our planet is being plundered for profit.

The consumption of animals - whether you're wearing them or eating them - is extraordinarily damaging to the planet. There are over a billion animals killed a year for food, half of which don't even get eaten. And there's over 50 million animals killed just for fashion.

If you look at it ecologically, deforestation is high on the list of things which bring devastation. You cut down trees to build homes, for fuel, and you end up with no trees left, and you have to move on. If you take the earth as a whole, eventually there's nowhere to move on to.

Economic development is what's going to make mountaintop removal palatable.

I will say this, - though: If it is true that fusion will put unlimited amounts of energy into our hands, then I'm worried. Our record on this score is extremely poor.

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.

Capitalism, as practiced, is a financially profitable, non-sustainable aberration in human development.

If we continue to set human borders and the economy as our highest priorities, we will never come to grips with the destructiveness of our activities and institutions.

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

We recently had a referendum in New York about extending the forest preserve. The city voted for it by a large majority; yet as I walk the streets I do not see afforestation written with conviction on the harried faces of my fellow citizens.

There are many challenges ahead, and one of the most important ones I face is ensuring the future sustainability of our city.

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.