Quotes about Sustainability

Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.

And although it was hard to match his excitement over washers and dryers, the results really were pretty amazing: By the time I left office, those new appliance standards were on track to remove another 210 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere annually.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.

My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year's worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

Eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body.

And to get those eggs on a regular basis, we need to take care of the goose. We need to create and care for the relationships that make those results possible.

Blossoming flowers look beautiful before they're cut or picked, but without soil or water they wither more quickly than grass.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

It's really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.