Sustainability and green energy can't just be new words with which we keep doing the wrong thing. We need to rethink our lives, to respect nature first.

THE TERM (Sustainability) HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

In talking about sustainability I like to use a metaphor of sport, of a game. When you are in a sustainability exercise it is possible to lose. You can be unsustainable. But the converse doesn't hold. There is no point at which you can say that you have won. Sustainability consists of staying in the game; that is, continuing with the ability to solve problems. It is like a dance where you must be constantly in motion. There is no point where you can rest and say "Aha! We are sustainable!" It is something that always requires adjustment.

Sustainability is important in building not just projects and programs but also building the human capital needed to sustain them. For sustainability to be achieved, when you build solid systems and also invest in the human resource needed to run those systems, it has very positive economic consequences on the global economy.

Sustainability should be integrated into every aspect of our lives. Businesses should be accountable for the indirect unintended consequences of supply and consumption.

The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.

Stop doing what is easy. Start doing what is right.

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

The first element of sustainability you need is for your country to be functional. Without that functionality, you will sit and make all the plans, and you will end up with a lot of troubles. That functionality of your country partly depends on the ability of proper journalists to do their job.

To find our steady state and solve the sustainability puzzle, we need to abandon the relentless quest for dominance. We need to abandon our visions of progress as growth... Only progress in diversity, equality, and beauty can stand the test of time. We need to live within our limits.

Stop doing what is easy or popular. Start doing what is right.

a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That’s not going to move us forward.

The threat to our way of life is a consequence of our way of life. That's what unsustainability means.

I define sustainable history as a durable progressive trajectory in which the quality of life on this planet or other planets is premised on the guarantee of human dignity for all at all times and under all circumstances.