environment
If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees. If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the earth’s CO2 blanket, the earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation, this is high school science.
The Great Disruption (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 2.
Sustainability is when if you keep doing what you’re doing you’ll be able to keep doing what you’re doing.
Quoted by John Abrams in The Company We Keep (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2005), 158.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything.
Interview in The Believer, September 2010.
I aim for appropriate self-reliance, not for independence. Independence is for Neanderthals.
“Author Carol Deppe on Growing ‘Lots of Delicious Food for the Least Possible Work,'” Q&A by Makenna Goodman, Grist, October 18, 2010.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
University of Portland commencement speech, May 3, 2009.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.
University of Portland commencement speech, May 3, 2009.
The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 122.
Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.
Thomas L. Friedman’s quotes Watson in “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” The New York Times, July 24, 2010.