Future Earth

“Yes, there are constraints on our actions, conventions and structural injustices that set the parameters of possibility. Our free will is not omnipotent – we can't do whatever we want. But, as Scranton says, we are free to choose from possible options. And one of our options is to make environmentally conscientious choices. It doesn't require breaking the laws of physics–or even electing a green president–to select something plant-based from a menu or at the grocery store. And although it may be a neoliberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all. Both macro and micro actions have power, and when it comes to mitigating our planetary destruction, it is unethical to dismiss either, or to proclaim that because the large cannot be achieved, the small should not be attempted.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“And you can't force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media.”
― rebecca solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them—such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects—just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’.”
― Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist