Sustainable Quotes

I was born in a slum, but the slum wasn't born in me.

Like an athlete trains, so must the student of life.

Elizabeth Salamanca-Brosig

It's just so impressive to see how the women have used making Fair Trade clothes to escape poverty and empower themselves and their children. - Emma Watson

Empowerment is the most effective and sustainable way to improve the lives of others.

A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.

Gloria Ng

I believe in living healthily and sustainably, and looking to nature for renewal and inspiration.

The German birds didn't taste as good as their French cousins, nor did the frozen Dutch chickens we bought in the local supermarkets. The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

Barbara Kingsolver

Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.

Realize that employees and the customers both have to be engaged, at the same time, to move your business forward for sustainable success.

Robert G. Thompson

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power.

There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all these landscapes. We turn wild trees to standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. But every fish is different from every other fish. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember specificity is everything.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It’s cool when fashion recycles itself, it’s not cool when sustainable living does because it means there was (and is as I write) a period of absolute and possibly irreversible destruction.

Cameron Conaway