Interconnected Issues Quotes

The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.

Climate change isn't just an environmental issue; it's a technology, water, food, energy, population issue. None of this happens in a vacuum.

Problems in a company are like cockroaches in the kitchen. You will never find just one

I don't want to be involved with just the environment because I think other issues tie so much into the environment, like native issues, children's issues, women's rights - I think they all completely tie into each other, even the economy.

The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

It is a common experience that attempts to solve just one piece of a problem first, then others, and so on, lead to endless involutions. You no sooner solve one aspect of a thing, than another point is out of point. And when you correct that one, something else goes wrong. You go round and round in circles, unable to produce a form that is thoroughly right.

We're looking at the singular condition of poverty. All the other individual problems spring from that condition... doesn't matter if it's death, aid, trade, AIDS, famine, instability, governance, corruption or war. All of that is poverty. Our problem is that everybody tries to heal each of the individual aspects of poverty, not poverty itself.

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.

Every day on our streets there are people who are facing a combination of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. Each of these conditions is challenging alone, but when experienced at the same time it creates a downward spiral that makes it even more difficult for the person to get treated and housed.

We need to connect the dots between climate, poverty, energy, food and water. These issues cannot be addressed in isolation

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

very often we think about political change in defined compartments these days. Environment in one box, inequality in another, racial and gender justice in a couple of other boxes, education over here, health over there. And within each compartment, there are thousands upon thousands of different groups and NGOs, each competing with one another for credit, name recognition and of course, resources. In other words, we act a lot like corporate brands. Now, this is often referred to as the problem of silos. Now, silos are understandable. They carve up our complex world into manageable chunks. They help us feel less overwhelmed. But in the process, they also train our brains to tune out when somebody else's issue comes up and when somebody else's issue needs our help and support. And they also keep us from seeing glaring connections between our issues.

The link between domestic policy and international affairs is essential: We cannot say we care about domestic issues and we leave international politics, and the opposite is wrong as well. Both are connected and should be addressed together.

every issue that we deal with in this country has a moral component to it. And so, to divorce a moral component to the debt burden we're leaving the next generation, the tax structure to how we spend our money in Washington, and how we - you know, how we value human life - I mean, all of those things, to me interrelate. They're not - they're not separate issues.

Behind every cloud is another cloud.

I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they're doing something that I haven't seen for a long time. And that is, they're linking issues together. You can't talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can't talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can't talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can't do that. They're making those connections.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

You can't work on the biceps and ignore the rest of the body, and you can't just say one issue is important when you are looking at how to make the world a better place.

Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction.

The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

I suppose the problem ... is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and the other takes up.

No plan of popular education can be realized alone; a change both in the political and material condition of the people is also needed; and they who imagine that an educational transformation may be accomplished alone, deceive themselves.