Environmental Sustainability Quotes

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.

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

In your hands winter is a book with cloud pages that snow pearls of love.

If the demographic of your target market is extremely environmentally conscious, then they are going to feel dissatisfied if your packaging is not biodegradable.

Artificial intelligence has many bigger roles to play for environmental sustainability, energy recycling, and pollution prevention.

The principles of ethical AI systems are more focused on reducing carbon footprints and improving socio-environmental sustainability.

This world is not here for you; you are here for it.

We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.

Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism.

Throughout my life, I have never stopped to strategize about my next steps. I often just keep walking along, through whichever door opens. I have been on a journey and this journey has never stopped. When the journey is acknowledged and sustained by those I work with, they are a source of inspiration, energy and encouragement. They are the reasons I kept walking, and will keep walking, as long as my knees hold out.

For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.

Ethical AI system principles are more focused on lowering carbon footprints and improving socio-environmental sustainability.

Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know: the earth does not belong to man - man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood that unites one's family. All things are connected.

We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully - on the only planet we can call home.

Jack Travis was a novelty in my experience, an old-fashioned man's man. None of the boys I had gone to college with had been anything more than that, just boys trying to figure out who they were and what their place in the world was. Dane and his friends were sensitive, environmentally aware guys who rode bikes and had Facebook accounts. I couldn't imagine Jack Travis ever blogging or worrying about finding himself, and it was pretty certain that he didn't give a damn about whether or not his clothes were sustainably produced.

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.

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

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

In trying to explain this linkage, I was inspired by a traditional African tool that has three legs and a basin to sit on. To me the three legs represent three critical pillars of just and stable societies. The first leg stands for democratic space, where rights are respected, whether they are human rights, women's rights, children's rights, or environmental rights. The second represents sustainable and equitable management and resources. And the third stands for cultures of peace that are deliberately cultivated within communities and nations. The basin, or seat, represents society and its prospects for development. Unless all three legs are in place, supporting the seat, no society can thrive. Neither can its citizens develop their skills and creativity. When one leg is missing, the seat is unstable; when two legs are missing, it is impossible to keep any state alive; and when no legs are available, the state is as good as a failed state. No development can take place in such a state either. Instead, conflict ensues.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation. Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel. Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world. It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation.

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth's biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.

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

I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won't live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines.

I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.

Nurture nature and nature nurtures us all

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.

The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

Inaction is no longer acceptable.

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

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

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

If modern environmentalism continue on the current path of wilding the city, future urban dwellers might as well live in tree houses, for all the difference it will make.

Grass fed meat is an environmental nightmare perpetuated by elitists who refuse to change their eating habits.

Reusing and repurposing is one of the most effective ways to contribute to environmental sustainability.

Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.

Corporate Social Responsibility is a company’s commitment to its stakeholders — to conduct business in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner. At scale, and with mass buy-in, society at whole is the beneficiary of Multiplicative Value Effects.

Humans...The land provides everything that anybody would need. If you take only what you need, the land renews itself so that it can provide more. Medicines, water, plants, meat. In exchange, because we don’t really have anything the land wants, we honor it for what it gives us...When you take more than the land can provide, it stops giving. It can’t give. That’s what’s happened here. That’s what happens with humans.

Companies should embrace sustainable business practices because it demonstrates corporate responsibility, reduces environmental impact, and appeals to socially conscious consumers. Sustainable practices not only contribute to a better planet but can also enhance brand image, customer loyalty, and long-term profitability.

We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can't settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.

The winning candidate, now the president elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible. Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump's top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama's temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world's largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump's victory, registered a 50 percent gain.

The wild things and places belong to all of us. So while I can't fix the bigger problems of race in the United States - can't suggest a means by which I, and others like me, will always feel safe - I can prescribe a solution in my own small corner. Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers, and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines. Our responsibility is to pass something on to those coming after. As young people of color reconnect with what so many of their ancestors knew - that our connections to the land run deep, like the taproots of mighty oaks; that the land renews and sustains us - maybe things will begin to change.

The vision of the ideal life that we've been taught in the West, which is gaining ever more purchase in China and India and elsewhere, feeds the system we need to undo. Go to school in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to earn money so you can try to buy happiness because your life sucks, then retire and die: this is not meaningful living.

There is a massive ‘solutions vacuum’ for our environmental problems.

Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact

three-sector model of sustainability – which aims to focus attention on finding overlaps between environmental, economic and social domains of thought and action

We have a duty to care for the environment.

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.

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

I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them.

Placing people and their daily activities close together doesn't just make the people more interesting; it also makes them greener.

The environmental movement of the 21st century created a new path to sustainability for cities, the path of wilderness.

Animal agriculture causes more environmental damage than any other industry, but it makes no sense to hate bovines with hamburger in hand.

Thanks to animal agriculture, our water contains an abundance of manure, pesticides, antibiotics, nitrates, and arsenic.

we are the transformed we are the awoken we lay your visions of a concrete world in ashes we build a new, a living world away from death and decay

Innovation is the heart of humanity. We need new ideas and new creativities to help address contemporary issues.

Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. ... Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.

In 2010 I started my degree in Environmental Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh. I showed up as a fresh-faced 16-year-old, ready to learn how we were going to fix some of the world’s biggest challenges. Four years later, I left with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems. Each day at Edinburgh was a constant reminder of how humanity was ravaging the planet.

On what reasonable grounds would sincere, informed environmentalists refuse to join animal advocates in a campaign to protect increasingly threatened fish populations from the snapping teeth of humanity?

The processes of corporate power do not work in isolation. The economic and legal mechanisms that allow the privatization of the commonwealth, externalization of costs, predatory economic practices, political influence-buying, manipulation of regulation and deregulation, control of the media, propaganda and advertising in schools, and the use of police and military forces to protect the property of the wealthy-all of these work synergistically to weave a complex web of power. Activists have dedicated lifetimes of necessary work to deal with the results of corporate power, by trying to mitigate the results of power: an ever-increasing disparity in wealth and power and continual economic, political, environmental, and human rights crises. For social justice campaigns to be strategic, it is also necessary to examine how privatization, externalization, monopoly, and other corporate power processes have been institutionalized. This institutionalization is exemplified in the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and in recent "free" trade agreements which have culminated in the creation of the World Trade Organization. An understanding of such institutions provides a necessary tool for achieving the long-term goals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatization, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often, resistance to them is highly compartmentalized. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change; the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. Too many of us fail to make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. Overcoming these disconnections, strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements, is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.

Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.

The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicing present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may live under their shade … never I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us … as to us; we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath.

China’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. But it is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained. Something has to give way.

The obvious pollution occurring in many places - worst of all, in the planned societies- has encouraged the growth of the environmental movement, which, however, as shown in previous chapters, has an agenda that goes far beyond clean-up and beautification, far beyond the stewardship of nature that is commanded by ancient religious tradition. Embracing the "biospheric vision" in the "spirit of deep ecology", the movement sees human beings as the chief enemy in the struggle on behalf of a deified Nature. The environmental movement, therefore, is the perfect vehicle for population control. It is popular - people do love trees and animals and beautiful scenery - and it is unequivocal in its devotion to reducing human numbers. The environmental agencies of the United Nations, with their chilling blueprints for "demographic transition" and a standardless, undefined but totally planned and controlled "sustainable development", combine the fervor of nature worship with the lack of accountability of an unelected, international bureaucracy.

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have - a pencil, say- why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don't have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple toons, why encumber yourself with something complicated? And yet, if we are ever again going to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to 'need'.

Humanity's current demand for energy is fundamentally unsustainable. The only feasible choice is to conduct a massive downscaling of all economic, industrial, and political operations. A decentralized, autonomous, and locally-based energy infrastructure is ultimately the only sustainable option.

In the boreal forests there is reason to hope that we’ll guide the human part of this relationship with forethought. Over the last two decades, continent wide planning for conservation, forestry, and industry in the boreal forest have brought people together who have fought for years in the law courts. Now timber companies, industry, conservation groups, environmental activists, and governments, including those of the First Nations, are talking to one another. Such human talk is part of the forest’s larger system of thought, one way that the living network can achieve a measure of coherence; a diffuse conversation, able to listen and to adapt. To date, swaths of boreal forest as big as many countries- hundreds of thousands of square kilometers- more than 10 percent of Canada’s boreal forest- have been mapped for conservation, for carbon-savvy logging, for threatened animals, and for sustainable timber production.

In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

He'd been planting trees in the wilderness for 3 years. He'd planted a hundred thousand of them. Out of those, twenty thousand had come up. Of the twenty thousand he expected to lose half, because of rodents or the unpredictable ways of Providence. That still meant ten Thousand Oaks would grow where before there had been nothing.

Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.

We must encourage energy conservation and sustainable development. Young people are the ones who are most environmentally conscious in Ireland, so that to some extent they are educating their parents. They are tackling issues of waste disposal and so on. The schools help, because they put a lot of stress on environmental awareness.

Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we're destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's lifetimes and beyond.

Environmental protection has become an arena for bitter partisan battles, leading to inaction on critical agenda items including reframing the nation’s energy strategy and confronting the existential threat of climate change. What is going on? Why has a policy area that once enjoyed broad bipartisan support become a source of deep division?

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.

Millions of people across the world live in a state of acute environmental crises caused by the lack of access to safe and usable water resources, because of natural disasters, socio-economic conditions, wars and conflicts. At Green the Gene, we are developing extremely simple yet highly technology and data intensive solutions tailored to address extremely specific problems faced by communities.

Humanity faces vast environmental challenges in the coming years; yet to suggest that they are unconquerable would be to place too little faith in the ability of people, both as individuals and as groups, to understand the world and respond to it effectively. Great change is coming; I hope and believe that people can take the initiative to enact change on a global scale, rather than becoming the victims of global change.

Many argue that individual action doesn't matter in an issue as global and enormous as the climate crisis. They are wrong. Individual actions matter, but perhaps not in the way you think. You alone will not solve the climate crisis. Neither will I. But if you intentionally live a more sustainable life and connect with your community about your practice of One Green Thing, you can build momentum for culture change to shift policy.

There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner, along with all the animals that have dwindled past the point of genetic feasibility.

When we take a closer look at the real costs of urbanisation in the global economy, we can see how far this is from the truth. Precisely because there are so many people, a globalised economic model which can only feed, house and clothe a small minority has to be abandoned. ... The devastating consequences of urbanisation are not only environmental; they are also social. ... In providing alternatives to urbanisation and to a globalised economy, (the eco-village movement) presents models for living close to the land and in community with one another.

A pre-mortem typically starts with the leader asking everyone in the team to imagine that the project has gone horribly wrong and to write down the reasons why on a piece of paper. He or she then asks everyone to read a single reason from the list, starting with the project manager, before going around the table again. Klein cites examples where issues have surfaced that would otherwise have remained buried. ‘In a session held at one Fortune 50-size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired,’ he writes. ‘Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.’15 The purpose of the pre-mortem is not to kill off plans, but to strengthen them. It is also very easy to conduct. ‘My guess is that, in general, doing a pre-mortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned,’ Kahneman has said. ‘But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial. So the pre-mortem is a low-cost, high-pay-off kind of thing.

Middle East and Africa is a product of failed states unable to keep up with the age of accelerations and enable their young people to realize their full potential. But these trends are exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and environmental degradation, which are undermining the agricultural foundations that sustain vast African and Middle Eastern populations on rural lands. The combination of failing states and failing agriculture is producing millions of young people, particularly young men, who have never held a job, never held power, and never held a girl’s hand. That

There are too many people in the world, and too many more are on the way. This is an issue that, in the United States, both conservatives and liberals have often seemed eager to avoid--for conservatives, perhaps, because it raises questions about family size, birth control, and abortion, and for liberals because it raises questions about immigration. Every one of the world's environmental problems is made worse by increases in the number of humans, and, most of all, by increases in the number of Americans, since U.S. residents--whether manufactured locally or imported from abroad--have the largest energy and carbon footprints in the world.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

He [Aldo Leopold] recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country - that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. He sort of invented the concept of wilderness as we now understand it in America: a stretch of country without roads, where all human movement must happen on foot or horseback. He understood that to keep a little remnant of our continent wild, we had no choice but to exercise restraint. I think it's one of the best ideas our culture ever had, not to mention our best hope for preserving the full diversity of nonhuman life in a few functioning ecosystems.

Today's American food culture is a contested landscape in search of values, new direction, and its own indigenous sense of rightness and self-worth. It's a culture looking toward ecology, the regional flow of seasons, and opportunities for new ways to invigorate and color the American palate. Our new foodies are concerned with health, sustainability, environmental integrity, social justice, and the push-pull between global and local economies. Our food world is a charged scene of culinary inquiry continually in search of ancestors, historic precedent, and novel ways to explore tradition while surging forward. The chefs and culinarians of twenty-first-century America have become hungry for an origin story all our own.

Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Seit Jahr und Tag ist notorisch, daß unsere Erde das vorausberechenbare Wachstum der Bevölkerung, die Erschöpfung der natürlichen Ressourcen und die Auszehrung der Umwelt nicht lange erträgt. Wir leben seit geraumer Zeit auf Kosten kommender Generationen. [...] Die Gefahr, daß die Menschheit sich selbst zerstört, ist auch dann nicht gebannt, wenn der Atomkrieg ausbleibt." ("It has been an obvious fact for the longest time that our earth will not be able to sustain for long the foreseeable growth of its population, the exhaustion of its natural resources, and the emaciation of its natural environment. We have been living for quite a while at the expense of our future generations. [...] The absence of a nuclear war does not, by itself, diminish the danger of humanity's self-destruction.")

These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.

Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4 Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6 For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through which actors engage in a collective action.”8 The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

...[I]f the goal is a realistic sustainable future, then it’s necessary to take a look at what we can do to lengthen the lives of the products we’re going to buy anyway. So my ... answer to the question of how we can boost recycling rates is this: Demand that companies start designing products for repair, reuse, and recycling. Take, for example, the super-thin MacBook Air, a wonder of modern design packed into an aluminum case that’s barely bigger than a handful of documents in a manila envelope. At first glance, it would seem to be a sustainable wonder that uses fewer raw materials to do more. But that’s just the gloss; the reality is that the MacBook Air’s thin profile means that its components—memory chips, solid state drive, and processor—are packed so tightly in the case that there’s no room for upgrades (a point driven home by the unusual screws used to hold the case together, thus making home repair even more difficult). Even worse, from the perspective of recycling, the thin profile (and the tightly packed innards) means that the computer is exceptionally difficult to break down into individual components when it comes time to recycle it. In effect, the MacBook Air is a machine built to be shredded, not repaired, upgraded, and reused.

There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.

If the symbolic father is often lurking behind the boss--which is why one speaks of 'paternalism' in various kinds of enterprises--there also often is, in a most concrete fashion, a boss or hierarchic superior behind the real father. In the unconscious, paternal functions are inseparable from the socio-professional and cultural involvements which sustain them. Behind the mother, whether real or symbolic, a certain type of feminine condition exists, in a socially defined imaginary context. Must I point out that children do not grow up cut off from the world, even within the family womb? The family is permeable to environmental forces and exterior influences. Collective infrastructures, like the media and advertising, never cease to interfere with the most intimate levels of subjective life. The unconscious is not something that exists by itself to be gotten hold of through intimate discourse. In fact, it is only a rhizome of machinic interactions, a link to power systems and power relations that surround us. As such, unconscious processes cannot be analyzed in terms of specific content or structural syntax, but rather in terms of enunciation, of collective enunciative arrangements, which, by definition, correspond neither to biological individuals nor to structural paradigms... The customary psychoanalytical family-based reductions of the unconscious are not 'errors.' They correspond to a particular kind of collective enunciative arrangement. In relation to unconscious formation, they proceed from the particular micropolitics of capitalistic societal organization. An overly diversified, overly creative machinic unconscious would exceed the limits of 'good behavior' within the relations of production founded upon social exploitation and segregation. This is why our societies grant a special position to those who specialize in recentering the unconscious onto the individuated subject, onto partially reified objects, where methods of containment prevent its expansion beyond dominant realities and significations. The impact of the scientific aspirations of techniques like psychoanalysis and family therapy should be considered as a gigantic industry for the normalization, adaption and organized division of the socius. The workings of the social division of labor, the assignment of individuals to particular productive tasks, no longer depend solely on means of direct coercion, or capitalistic systems of semiotization (the monetary remuneration based on profit, etc.). They depend just as fundamentally on techniques modeling the unconscious through social infrastructures, the mass media, and different psychological and behavioral devices...Even the outcome of the class struggle of the oppressed--the fact that they constantly risk being sucked into relations of domination--appears to be linked to such a perspective.

The totalitarian greens, sometimes called ecofascists, would like to see most other humans eliminated in genocide and so leave a perfect Earth for them alone. At the other end of the spectrum are those who would like to see universal human welfare and rights, and somehow hope that luck, Gaia or sustainable development will allow this dream to come true. Greens could be defined as those who have sensed the deterioration of the natural world and would like to do something about it. They share a common environmentalism but differ greatly in the means for its achievement.

Got Milk — Or Leave It? Dairy is best kept to a minimum. There are many good reasons not to consume dairy. For example, there is a strong association between dairy lactose and ischemic heart disease. There is also a clear association between high–growth–promoting foods such as dairy products and cancer. There is a clear association between milk consumption and bladder, prostate, colorectal, and testicular cancers. Dairy fat is also loaded with various toxins and is the primary source of our nation's high exposure to dioxin. Dioxin is a highly toxic chemical compound that even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency admits is a prominent cause of many types of cancer in those consuming dairy fat, such as butter and cheese. Cheese is also a power inducer of acid load, which increases calcium loss further. Considering that cheese and butter are the foods with the highest saturated–fat content and the major source of our dioxin exposure, cheese is a particularly foolish choice for obtaining calcium. Cow's milk is "designed" to be the perfect food for the rapidly growing calf, but as mentioned above, foods that promote rapid growth promote cancer.

So-called 'circular' approaches - to the city, the economy, design - extend well beyond just limiting environmental impacts. They take on a more systemic, cyclical view of how physical and biological processes, together with human interactions, give rise to sustainable living environments - forming a complete self-sustaining 'ecosystem', like a closed circle.