Unsustainable Systems Quotes

It is all very well to idealise poverty and associate wisdom with begging bowls, or virtue with low estate. However, those who have done this (Buddhists, Christians, Communists and other fanatics) have dead ended or are dead ending

Democracies are at least contemporarily fickle and heartless.

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.

Empires always have the hubris to think they are indestructible, when in fact they are always unsustainable.

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.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

If science has a lot to do with what works, then clearly there's much about today's social and economic setup that isn't scientific, because things aren't working very well for a majority of the world's population or the environment.

The faltering of our suburban living arrangement is probably certain. The response of suburbanites is not. Will they elect maniacs who promise to make America just like it was in 1997? Will there be a desperate attempt to sustain the unsustainable by authoritarian measures? Will the institutions of order and justice fail in the process?

The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

We should have a system of economics that is structure that is organic tools. We do not have it. We are all hanging by our eyebrows from skyhooks economically, just as we are architecturally.

Even a casual observer can see that not one of the systems, institutions, and devices that our species has put into place on this planet to "create a better life for all" is functioning in a way that generates that outcome.