Quotes & Sayings About Sustainability

If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough. — Catherine Friend

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We have to have a way of dealing with this that engenders confidence, trust, gives us every chance of getting the right outcome and boosts both sustainability and economic return at the same time. — John Anderson

To succeed in the digital realm, technology has to provide a strong disruptive element right from the start. If things cannot be done differently , a transition to digital is not going to be compelling enough for a wide enough adoption to create sustainability. — David Amerland

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It's the job of people with critical sensibilities - those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it's difficult - not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous. — Robert Jensen

Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination — Janine Benyus

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable its existence. — Robert Gutman

We've got to think now, in real terms, for that seventh generation . . . We've got to get back to spiritual law if we are to survive. — Oren Lyons

Performance " is defined as company internal process which transforms the motivation and commitment to tackle sustainability issues perceived as relevant and important (perception, motivation, commitment can be summarised as "Response") into company internal changes. Performance itself can be split up into three individual but linked steps: — Anonymous

Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up. — Vandana Shiva

Sustainability, or fairness to the future, therefore involves the concept of stewardship, the idea that the living generation must be stewards of the earth's resources for the generations that will come later. That's a tough role to play. There is nothing natural or innate about it. We need to defend the interests of those whom we've never met and never will. Yet those are our descendants and our fellow humanity. Alas, it's a role that we've mostly ignored till now, to the increasing peril of all who will follow. The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles. — Jamais Cascio

A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability. — Wenonah Hauter

When the real problem is not well identified, only by chance a solution may be created. — Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Keeping people on side is a precondition of making any progress on sustainability issues — Jonathon Porritt

One buzzphrase that arose was 'sustainable development', which was used in two very different senses by opposing groups, because it left vague by what metric sustainability might be measured. Environmental groups meant by 'sustainability' a holistic approach by which life as we know it might be sustained. Scientists talked about 'sustainable cities' to mean cities that would not be destroyed by flooding in the wake of global warming. But to others, 'sustainable' meant a financial approach by which the oil industry as we know it might be sustained: sustainability was the minimum amount of environmental care that was affordable by those whose activities harmed the environment. — Steven Poole

Sustainability requires that we demand enduring quality. Steve Strong has a slide presentation pointing out that much of Oxford was built 800 years ago. What are we building today that will be here 800 years from now? If something like that emerged from this recession, it would help justify the hardship so many people are currently experiencing. — Denis Hayes

The choice is ours to make whether the stars in the night sky shine upon us as headlights of an approaching paradise or as tail-lights of receding fortunes — Agona Apell

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine) — Wendell Berry

My kids that's their backyard. I think when they're adults, their memories will be mostly of spending time at beach, the exploration, the freedom that you have. You take care of your house that you live in and we make our bed and we clean our cars and we do all that stuff, but yet we neglect sort of the place that really provides us with the greatest form of sustainability, which is the ocean. — Gabrielle Reece

If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I actually believe 'Sustainability', as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it's this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multibillion dollar industry. — Brandon Boyd

Sustainability is no longer optional. Companies that fail to adopt such practices will perish. They will not only lose cost basis: they will also suffer in recruiting employees as well as attracting customers. — John Replogle

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees. — Andy Couturier

Historically the Department of Education hasn't been doing enough to drive the sustainability movement, and today, I promise that we will be a committed partner in the national effort to build a more environmentally literate and responsible society. — Arne Duncan

GDP tells you nothing about sustainability — Joseph Stiglitz

Having the right priorities in a wrong world will humble you with a journey that only love can sustain. — Bryant McGill

Permaculture land-use ethics invite us to protect intact ecosystems where they remain and, where ecosystems have been destroyed, to help restore them. Permaculture design also suggests that we take care of earth while taking care of people. — Juliana Birnbaum Fox

Is achieving a meaningful sustainability of all vitally essential life systems for all future generations, wholly dependent upon recognizing our plain obligation as the sole keeper species? — Lee Kierig

Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind. — Gene Logsdon

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies. — Andy Couturier

People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. — Ha-Joon Chang

Creativity and imagination are not frosting on a cake: They are integral to our sustainability. They are survival mechanisms. They are of the essence of who we are. They constitute our deepest empowerment. — Matthew Fox

Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people. — Steven M. Greer

Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability-whether they are easily measured or not. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Inaction is no longer acceptable. — Eric Lowitt

I'm big on reworking vintage. Also, buying one great piece that lasts forever - to me, that is total sustainability. — Elizabeth Rogers

The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a "sustainable" house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy. — David Owen

It's shocking to think about how little the travel industry cares about sustainability - and it's the basis of their business! — Jochen Zeitz

If you look at the state of our planet, the next generations won't be around if we consider sustainability as a gimmick. — Jochen Zeitz

Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not. — Matthew Fox

Cultures throughout the world and throughout history that developed stable, sustainable relationships with nature did so through observation - a primary principle in permaculture. — Juliana Birnbaum Fox

The best innovations - both socially and economically - come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love. These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing. And that's why the heart of innovation is a desire to re-enchant the world. — Gary Hamel

I finally understood that I couldn't avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderful
thing, a beautiful thing. — Andy Couturier

The specific danger is us; we are rampant; this earth is our only friend; we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back. — William Kittredge

All too often we fail to ask what we are trying to sustain. Ultimately, sustainability must be measured by the endurance of thriving human communities. — Barton Seaver

Plan for the sustainability of your success so that you do not drift back to failure and mediocrity. — Archibald Marwizi

To achieve sustained high returns on capital requires possessing features that protect returns from competition; namely, competitive advantages. Identifying what these competitive advantages are and understanding their sustainability is an essential part of the quality investment process. — Lawrence A. Cunningham

Sustainability is no longer about doing less harm. It's about doing more good. — Jochen Zeitz

A highly worthwhile read with prescriptive examples for authentic sustainability and social justice initiatives at companies - not all about the brand, the celebrity or corporate self-interest (about the book 'Compassion, Inc.'). — Rebecca Aguilar

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course. — Ban Ki-moon

In the UK what we've found is that even businesses which prided themselves already on their efficient management find that a really beady-eyed scrutiny of their resource management, with an eye to environmental best-practice and long term sustainability, produce fresh efficiency and fresh savings that actually shock those in the company — Margaret Beckett

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible. — Edward O. Wilson

Real Love may run on a lower voltage, but it's also more grounded & sustainable. — Sharon Salzberg

Ban privileges. The rules of the game should be the same to all players, regardless of their size, location, or any other criteria — Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Sustainability is best illustrated by those who sell food ... just so they afford something to eat. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Premium will increasingly be defined in terms of sustainability and environmental compatibility — Norbert Reithofer

Conservation is the most important form of sustainability". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive. — Jamais Cascio

Everyone is talking about sustainability and resilience, yet all that knowledge is thrown in the bin. [Lagos is] a unique case, but also a test case. It's unbelievably unique, but also it's now considered with a number of really generic opinions, generic solution, generic expectations. — Rem Koolhaas

This is not about creating a giant. It's about creating the sustainability of the steel industry. — Lakshmi Mittal

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. — Krista Tippett

Forcing companies to recruit away from the golf course might lead to the appointment of more women from NGOs and academia and medicine, all of whom are likely to understand such concepts as stewardship and sustainability much better than men picked from the usual hunting grounds. — Noreena Hertz

The only technology that helps to create a plethora of business and employment opportunity while promoting the green environment, is serving good for the society and, therefore, the sustainability. — Anuj

We're reaching the point where the Earth will have to end the burden we've placed on her, if we don't lift the burden ourselves. — Steven M. Greer

I see entrepreneurship, like many other activities, as a type of mission. A mission by which we can provide better life chances and quality for both our current and future generations. — Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature. — David W. Orr

It's true that Doug and Anna live in their own universe, complete with its own language. Like Tuna McAlpine, the Crabtrees eschew the term "conventional" farming, preferring "chemically dependent." Doug can tell you exactly why. "We've been practicing agriculture foe approximately twelve thousand years and using poisons in great quantities for just sixty of them," he reasons, " so to label that 'convention' is a huge insult to eleven thousand nine hundred and forty years of agriculture. — Liz Carlisle

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it. — Andy Couturier

The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute. — Donella Meadows

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard. — Paul McCartney

If we don't get sustainability right in agriculture first, it won't happen anywhere. — Wes Jackson

Many business leaders are seeing the relationship between long term success and sustainability, and that's very heartening. — Jacqueline Novogratz

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability. — Janine Benyus

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

That's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship. — William J. Mitchell

If left unexecuted, even the greatest competitive strategies are not worth the paper on which they were written. — Eric Lowitt

Japan is already a leader in energy efficiency, and it has a wealth of innovative technologies. We must put this expertise to use creating a model for growth and sustainability that we can share with the world. — Yoshihiko Noda

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock. — Donella H. Meadows

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls. — Derrick Jensen

We cannot choose between [economic] growth and sustainability - we must have both — Paul Polman

The Nuffield report suggests that there is a moral imperative for investment into GM crop research in developing countries. But the moral imperative is in fact the opposite. The policy of drawing of funds away from low-cost sustainable agriculture research, towards hi-tech, exclusive, expensive and unsafe technology is itself ethically questionable. There is a strong moral argument that the funding of GM technology in agriculture is harming the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the developing world. — Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher

Discussions of sustainability as a political process have been taken up by a number of the social sciences centred on questions of power and outcomes for particular groups of people, across space and time. In short, this work raises sustainable development as a moral concept that seeks to define a 'fair and just' development (Starkey and Walford, 2001). The notion of 'environmental justice' is now a prominent part of contemporary discussions of the meaning and practice of sustainable development (see — Jennifer A. Elliott

All the conservation efforts in the world won't be enough to make a dent in the oncoming sustainability crisis our planet faces. — Naveen Jain

Brian Walker and David Salt have written a thoughtful and powerful book to help resource users and managers put resilience thinking into practice and aim toward increasing the sustainability of our world. I urge public officials, scholars, and students in public policy programs to place this volume on their list of must-read books. It is a powerful antidote to the overly simplified proposals too often offered as solutions to contemporary problems at multiple scales. — Elinor Ostrom

Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment. — Jamais Cascio

A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice. — Vandana Shiva

Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution. — Masanobu Fukuoka

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need. — Vandana Shiva

Sustainability is the key to our survival on this planet and will also determine success on all levels. — Shari Arison

The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy. — Ron Eglash

Education brings sustainability to all the development goals, and literacy is the foundation of all learning. It provides individuals with the skills to understand the world and shape it, to participate in democratic processes and have a voice, and also to strengthen their cultural identity. — Irina Bokova

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point. — William McDonough

To be an effective organisation, the structure of the organisation must be willing to adapt to a network model, leaving the old hierarchy model behind. We see the efficacy of the network model daily in many areas of our lives, and this greatly challenges the old from-top-to-down hierarchical model that many organisations have a hard time letting go of. But I suppose at the end of the day, it is a matter of survival. Simply put, in order to survive, one must adapt and to adapt today, means to take on a more networked approach to doing things in organisations, groups, companies and even in society as a whole (including politics). So in other words, in order for society in all of its forms from big to small, to move forward strongly, it must adapt to a framework that sees itself as a network rather than a hierarchy. — C. JoyBell C.

Japan's experience suggests the importance of assessing the sustainability of price stability over a fairly long period, which many central banks have emphasized in recent years. — Toshihiko Fukui

A key part of helping startups is providing them with a G/SCORE that measures a company on the path to sustainability. We score companies from around the world and use Knoodle so they can easily sync video and presentations together for a more effective pitch. We send these pitches to judges all around the world and it's critical that we have a flexible tool that is easy to create, easy to deliver, and effective at letting audiences understand the entrepreneur and their innovation. — Chris Shipley

Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition. — Tom Turner

I used to think success would be sustainability. Not being behind the eight ball ... — Ted Leo

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 — Garrison Keillor