15 Great Quotes about Sustainability and the Environment

1.The most sustainable way is to not make things. The second most sustainable way is to make something very useful, to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved – Thomas Sigsgaard

2. Sustainability is about ecology, economy and equity – Ralph Bicknese

3. What is the use of a house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on? – Henry David Thoreau

4. [Sustainability is] growth based on forms and processes of development that do not undermine the integrity of the environment on which they depend – Jim MacNeill, Former Secretary General of the World Commission on Environment and Development

5. One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. – Jack London, White Fang

6. What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. – Gandhi    

7. Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein  

8. When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. – John Muir

9. People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it ― Ha-Joon Chang

10. Sustainability requires maintaining life-supporting natural capital in order for our socioeconomic goals to be met. – Warren Flint

 11. Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word ‘success.’ – David Wann

 12. Humankind has not woven the web of life.

We are but one thread within it.

Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.

All things are bound together.

All things connect.

– Chief Seattle, 1854

 13. The premise of the Taker story is ‘the world belongs to man’… The premise of the Leaver story is ‘man belongs to the world’.” ― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

14. He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. -Aldo Leopold