Sustainability Failure Quotes

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

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.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

I love the environment, but I'm cheap on the environment.

Imagine a ship that is sinking and needs all the available power to run the pumps to drain out the rising waters. The first class passengers refuse to cooperate because they feel hot and want to use the air-conditioner and other electrical appliances. The second-class passengers spend all their time trying to be upgraded to first-class status. The boat sinks and the passengers all drown. That is where the present approach to climate change is leading.

I was studying the impacts of fishing on ocean life, while the places that I loved so much continued to decline: less and smaller fish, less corals, and more microbes. I found myself writing the obituary of nature with increasing precision. Unsatisfied and frustrated, I felt like a doctor telling the patient how she is going to die, with excruciating detail. If I were that patient, I would have fired myself and looked for a doctor who would look for a solution.

It's not because nature is angry, it's rather that we are stupid. We're not doing the right thing with our planet.

The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

To cite my own alma mater, it's shocking to me that Yale University can teach what it teaches at the Yale School of Environmental Studies and utterly fail to mirror those values in any way in its investment practices.

Even our rules and regulations, our laws, our policies, favor the destructive nature of taking too much from the ocean and using techniques that are horribly destructive. We know they don't work. We know it's not sustainable.