“The problem is that efficiency will be insufficient to get us to the new paradigm. If you posited that the goal was to be a 100% renewably powered planet, if we just simply are more efficient than what we are doing today with the coal and the nuclear, then we are still coal-powered and nuclear-powered. We are just more efficient about it. So it does not bring us to the renewable equation. That’s where we call for eco-effectiveness that goes along with eco-efficiency. Eco-effectiveness is doing the right thing instead of doing the wrong thing the right way.”

Corporate Knights Magazine: 2008 Investment

 

"...we mustn’t ask the marketplace to do things it is not meant to do and not capable of doing. Markets are very good at the short-term allocation of scarce resources, but markets are meant to be efficient, not sufficient, and greedy, not fair. They don’t tell us how much is enough. They don’t tell us the whole purpose of a human being. And they certainly cannot substitute for politics, ethics, or faith. We must always remember that markets make a splendid servant, a bad master, and a worse religion. I am therefore not an economic fundamentalist: I take markets seriously, not literally."

“One hundred years ago at the dawn of the industrial revolution, people thought long and hard about the kind of cities and regions they wanted to build. I don’t know what’s happened, but it’s almost as if we’ve had this gigantic stroke or mental breakdown where we can’t think about cities and regions. When a city or region gets over 3.5 million or 4 million or 5 million people, the whole nature of its development changes. It has to become more dependent on public transit, on rail, on subway. It can no longer be so dependent on the car. It can’t sprawl in the way that it did. The whole system seems to break down.”

“We need democracy for capitalism to function. We need a campaign finance system that keeps corporate money out of politics. Corporations should not be running our political system. Corporations are good things. They drive our economy. They encourage people to assemble wealth and to risk it and they create jobs. But corporations don’t want free markets; they don’t want democracy. They want profits, and the best way for them to get profits is to use the campaign finance system—which is just a system of legalized bribery—in order to capture and get their hooks into public officials, then use those public officials to dismantle the market place and give them monopoly control and to privatize the commons.”

Jane Goodall quoting an Inuit leader from Greenland at the UN Millennium Peace Summit:

 

“Brothers and sisters, I have a message for you from your brothers and sisters in the north. Up in the north we know every day what your people do in the south. Up in the north the ice is melting. What will it take to melt the ice of the human heart?”

Janine Benyus on modeling a sustainable economy after a Type 3 mature ecosystem:

 

“These are systems like the large mature forest or the established prairie. Their biggest characteristic is that they are not going anywhere. They take what is given, the opportunities, and they acknowledges their limits. They start to recycle the nutrients over and over again...All the niches are filled. There is full employment. There are many diverse sorts of jobs and the jobs centre around using every single crumb of nutrients in that system. The interactions among organisms are complex. There are a lot more symbiotic and cooperative relationships than you see in a Type 1 system. The emphasis is on quality instead of quantity.  It is not a leaky system. The system itself creates more and more opportunities for life and that means that more and more niches are created.”

“If there are still people living on this planet in 200 years, it will be because they are not living the way we are today. Now, 200 years is an outside limit—I don’t think we have anything like that amount of time...We’re in the midst of a food race. In the arms race of the Cold War each side would make an advance that would be answered by an advance on the other side; it continually escalated. In our food war we make an advance in food production that is answered by an increase in population growth, which must then be answered by another increase in food production. This cannot go on. If we’re going to survive we’re going to have to stop growing.”

“I certainly think that the current economic paradigm we are in is absolute lunacy. The economy is predicated on the notion that there are no limits, nature is an externality, and not only do these economists think it can grow, but it must grow forever. Well, as Paul Ehrlich says, when you live within a finite world—and we do within the biosphere—any system that thinks it can grow forever is like cancer. And the result of cancer—attempting to grow indefinitely—is the same as death. So what we have is an economic system that has disconnected itself from the real world, and it thinks humans are so great that we can grow forever. Well that is death as far as I’m concerned. It’s suicidal.

“There are skeptics everywhere, obviously. I want to ask the skeptics to make their case. What is the case for double-glazing the planet?  Give me the business case. And while you are talking about the cost of preventing global warming,please address the cost of not preventing it. Yeah,I’d like to hear what is the business case for destroying habitat for countless species? What is the business case for relegating a billion people to unemployment?  What is the business case for destroying the life support systems of the Earth? What is the business case?  I want to hear it. How can you possibly defend a system that says it is cheaper to destroy the Earth than to take care of it?  What kind of system is that?”

“The life-supporting ecosystems on the planet are in systematic decline. At the same

time, our demand for the services and resources of those ecosystems is systematically increasing...So, yes, since the carrying capacity is declining we have already trespassed the physical limits of growth. It’s as if we find ourselves in a funnel, with decreasing room to maneuver as time goes on. The collective challenge we face is to chart a course for the opening of the walls of the funnel...This is essentially a design challenge—it means redesigning products, services, processes, organizations, communities, business models and so on in such a way that they come into a respectful balance with nature. The narrowing walls of the funnel described above imply increasing pressure on companies to pursue more sustainable practices or suffer the economic consequences.”

 

“What we measure in growth is called the Gross Domestic Product, GDP.  That is a collection of statistics on sales of goods and services and bads and nuisances.  So a cancer patient that gets into a car wreck has just added to the GDP.  But is that person better off?  I don’t think any of us want to aspire to increasing the GDP in that way.”

 

“Sitting in negotiations today, the industrial world is on one side of the cliff with the developing world on the other, both throwing lightning bolts of empty rhetoric on respective ‘commitments’ across a dark intellectual chasm. In my front row seat, it is scary indeed. Accordingly, our challenge is finding a fair and practical framework to cross this political divide.”

 

“Well, it may be that there is a conflict between two impossibilities. It is politically impossible to limit growth, but it is biophysically impossible to continue it. That is a really tough dilemma. You have to choose on which horn of the dilemma do you want to be impaled. I guess I would prefer to take my chances with political impossibility because I am pretty convinced that I can’t do a thing about biophysical impossibility.”