Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?
Maurice StrongRead
After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.
Interpretation
Sustainability involves managing the Earth's resources responsibly, similar to how a corporation manages its assets.
Maurice Strong's quote emphasizes the importance of treating the Earth as a valuable asset that must be maintained and preserved. Just as a corporation tracks and manages its resources through financial practices, we must apply similar principles to our natural environment to ensure its health and longevity for future generations.
In practice
This quote can be used in environmental policy discussions to highlight the economic perspective of sustainability.
Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?
The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.
A citizen of an advanced industrialized nation consumes in six months the energy and raw materials that have to last the citizen of a developing country his entire lifetime.
The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world.
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.
If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
Mineral cactai, quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls, the bird that punctures space, thirst, tedium, clouds of dust, impalpable epiphanies of wind. The pines taught me to talk to myself. In that garden I learnedto send myself off. Later there were no gardens.
As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can".
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.