Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.
Interpretation
An environmental revolution demands sacrifices for significant benefits over time.
This quote by Donella Meadows emphasizes the transformative potential of an environmental revolution, suggesting that while it requires significant sacrifices and may take a long time to manifest, the changes it invokes can fundamentally reshape our world, including our institutions and cultures. However, it also acknowledges the uncertainty of such a revolution actually occurring, underscoring that such a future is not guaranteed.
In practice
In a speech on climate action, one might say, 'Like the other great revolutions, remember that an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains.'
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
Speak the truth._x000D_ Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,_x000D_ and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power._x000D_ Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence._x000D_ All growth is not good._x000D_ The environment is a necessity, not a luxury._x000D_ There is such a thing as enough.
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]
It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
Change will not come from above, it will come from below, from the small and medium size businesspeople. They do dare to show their faces. They applaud us and help us financially.
If you give people unlimited time and money, they'll do things the same old way. But if they have to achieve the goal in a brief time, they'll either give up or try something new.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.
Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
Do not belong to the past dawns,but to the noons of future
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.