Quotes about Green

We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.

The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism.

To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people.

A green economy begins to replace some of the clunking and chugging of ugly machines with the wise effort of beautiful, skilled people. That means more jobs.

To be green is to reject right and left, and to be green is definitely not blue or red.

If the hole we've dug ourselves into is consumerism, it doesn't particularly help that your shovel is a fashionable shade of green.

Home should be a sanctuary, a place that feels safe and healthy, looks beautiful, and smells wonderful. Seriously... make it a place that you can come to and have an immediate feeling of… Aaaaah. I'm home. Awesome.
 
You don't need to hire a decorator or buy all new stuff or take on a new mortgage. Greening your house will go a long way toward making wherever you are an oasis. A green home is the most sanctuary-like home around - by which I mean it's beautiful and healthy and it smells terrific.

I am not a veteran environmentalist. I don't live in a house made of recycled tires, I've never handcuffed myself to a tree, and I don't grow my own organic rutabaga.

Dissipative Structures - Chapter 8 – excerpt from page 178Green plants play a vital role in the flow of energy through all ecological cycles. Their roots take in water and mineral salts from the earth, and the resulting juices rise up to the to the leaves, where they combine with carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air to form sugars and other organic compounds. (These include cellulose, the main structural element of cell walls.) In this marvelous process, known as photosynthesis, solar energy is converted into chemical energy and bound in the organic substances, while oxygen is released into the air to be taken up again by other plants, and by animals, in the process of respiration.

By blending water and minerals from below with sunlight and CO2 from above, green plants link the earth to the sky. We tend to believe that plants grow out of the soil, but in fact most of their substance comes from the air. The bulk of the cellulose and the other organic compounds produced through photosynthesis consists of heavy carbon and oxygen atoms, which plants take directly from the air in the form of CO2. Thus the weight of a wooden log comes almost entirely from the air. When we burn a log in a fireplace, oxygen and carbon combine once more into CO2, and in the light and heat of the fire we recover part of the solar energy that went into making the wood.

We need an honest bottom line. Today that bottom line is vastly subsidized. If anyone of us were paying the full cost of oil our bottom lines would be very different. If you internalize the cost of oil, look at the cost of the war in the Middle East or the cost of global warming for future generations, if you internalize those external costs and what you pay, that bottom line would look very different, what ever business you are in. If we somehow put a value on species extinction and factor that into our costs that bottom line would look very different. IF we put any resource depletion into costs our bottom line would change. So what we have is a dishonest market that does not take into account all the costs when it establishes its prices. We need an honest marketplace before we can let the market work for sustainability rather than against it as it works today.

The status quo is a product of our culture or our culture is a product of the status quo -- I’m sure which is the effect and which is the product -- there is probably a feedback loop there that is mutually reinforcing. But we have a culture that says "hey, look around. This place called Earth was created for you and you can do anything you want with it."

And of course we know that is flawed. We belong to it, it doesn’t belong to us. It’s a flawed world view. You see evidence of it all around us -- this idea that resources are limitless and we will never run out. Or that we can put anything we want to into the earth, throw poison into the sink. It’s very adolescent thinking. But yet there is a growing sense of ethics. We see a clear cutting in an old growth forest we say "that’s wrong." We see fish that are deformed from PCBs and we know that it’s wrong. We are waking up to the environmental ethics of living in paradise.

So, this thing called environmentalism is not new and not left-wing whacko. It dates from way back. Though religious conservatives prefer to call it “creation care”, it’s the same thing. It is an apolitical extension of a very long-term progression in the definition of what’s the right thing to do. Progress may occur in fits and starts with occasional setbacks, but the direction in environmental ethics is well established. There is an inevitability that goes hand-in-glove with the maturing of a species – a growing sense of right and wrong, extending to all of creation, including one of humankind’s most pervasive inventions: the industrial system and its built environment.

Marketing needs to define what sustainability means for their company and then decide how to express those values in their offerings. Companies should stop trying to appeal to green consumers by building green myths into the products they have and start creating something real—products that tell their environmental story for them.

the world is devided into people who think they are right

Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.

We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future -- things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?

That's one component: rather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.

"If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together." We have to go far. Quickly.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

What is the use of a house, if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Americans are incredibly inpatient. Someone once said that the shortest period of time in America is the time between when the light turns green and when you hear the first horn honk.

 "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."