Quotes about Sustainability

You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

Produce what you consume; draw from the native element the necessaries of life. Permit no vitiated taste to lead you into the indulgence of expensive luxuries, which can only be obtained by involving yourselves in debt.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

We should remember Christ's words, 'Let nothing be wasted,' when we look in our refrigerators and garbage cans and garages.

there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage.

Whatever we gain by the works of our own flesh, we will have to maintain the same way we gained it.

There will be no peace without a lowering of consumerism to match the banishment of arms. For the arms serve primarily either to usurp what belongs to others or to guarantee an arrangement already inequitable. The arms cannot be given up without abandoning swollen appetites as well.

we are flooded with the gifts of neighborliness—the economy of the rich devouring the poor is now inappropriate; we are now flooded with peaceable possibility—the old lust for war and violence is now out of sync; we are flooded with fruitfulness—the technological destruction that seeks to sustain our unsustainable standard of living is now passé.

One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.