Environmental Sustainability Quotes

“The climate crisis has been long framed as an issue of either techno-utopian tinkering, entrusting a few billionaires to save the day, or of collective self-sacrifices - us versus us. Have fewer children. Buy organic. Drive less. Amid all the carbon shaming, it's worth recalling Occupy Wall Street's most enduring slogan: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. If we didn't write ourselves subprime mortgages and we didn't on a whim decide to saddle ourselves with six figures worth of student debt, we certainly didn't wreck the planet. They did.”
― Kate Aronoff, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

“Through the way it values - or does not - the finite resources of our planet, double entry [accounting] now has the potential to make or break life on the earth. We can continue to ignore the free gifts of nature in the accounts of our nations and corporations, and thereby continue to ruin the planet. Or we can begin to account for nature and make it thrive again. If numbers and money are the only language spoken in the global capitalist economy, then this is the language we must use. Accountants, remodelled as eco-accountants, can plan a central role in this conversation - and it is for this reason that Jonathan Watts wrote in 2010 that they may be the one last hope for life on earth. As he also pointed out, done badly, eco-accounting will mean the natural world is further 'commodified, priced, sliced and sold to the highest bidder'. But done well, it could reframe our values and transform the capitalist world in ways we are yet to imagine.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World