-Jesus cited in the Gospel of Luke 14:1-2,10-12 NIV Bible  

sus.tain’a.bil’i.ty n.
the ability to meet the needs of the present while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems and without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs

-Definition from Sustainability at University of California, Berkeley  

The guiding rules are that people must share with each other and care for the Earth. Humanity must take no more from nature than nature can replenish. This in turn means adopting lifestyles and development paths that respect and work within nature's limits. It can be done without rejecting the many benefits that modern technology has brought, provided that technology also works within those

-World Conservation Union [ICUN], Caring for the Earth, 1991

Sustainable development can be defined as the process of developing land, cities, businesses and communities so that our current needs are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It recognizes that social, economic and environmental issues are interconnected and that decisions must incorporate each of these aspects in order to be successful over the longer term.

–Environment Canada

Care for the earth is not just an Earth Day slogan, it is a requirement of our faith. We are called to protect people and the planet, living our faith in relationship with all of God's creation. This environmental challenge has fundamental, moral and ethical dimensions that cannot be ignored.

-U.S. Catholic Bishops, Sharing Catholic Social Teaching, 1998

The world that God created has been entrusted to us. Our use of it must be directed by God's plan for creation, not simply for our own benefit. Our stewardship of the Earth is a form of participation in God's act of creating and sustaining the world. In our use of creation, we must be guided by a concern for generations to come. We show our respect for the Creator by our care for creation.

-U.S. Catholic Bishops, 
Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility, 2003

Care for the earth and for the environment is a moral issue. Protecting the land, water, and the air we share is a religious duty of stewardship and reflects our responsibility to born and unborn children, who are most vulnerable to environmental assault. Effective initiatives are required for energy conservation and the development of alternate, renewable, and clean energy resources. Our Conference offers a distinctive call to seriously address global climate change, focusing on the virtue of prudence, pursuit of the common good, and the impact on the poor, particularly on vulnerable workers and the poorest nations. The United States should lead in contributing to the sustainable development of poorer nations and promoting greater justice in sharing the burden of environmental blight, neglect, and recovery.

-U.S. Catholic Bishops, 
Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility, 2003

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

-Aldo Leopold (1886-1948)

But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present.  For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.

-Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope,”
A Continuous Harmony, 1970

No individual life is an end in itself.  One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life.  Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can live fully only by making ourselves answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 2000

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

-Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26^th President of the United States

Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances.  On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there’s still time.

-Paul R. Ehrlich, The End of Affluence, 1974

Let us protect our children; and let us not allow them to grow up into emptiness and nothingness, to the avoidance of good hard work, to introspection and analysis without deeds, or to mechanical actions without thought and consideration. Let us steer them away from the harmful chase after material things and the damaging passion for distractions... Let us educate them to stand with their feet rooted in God’s earth, but with their heads reaching even into heaven, there to behold truth.

-Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), The Education of Man, 1826,
ed. Jeffrey Stern, 1996

...the strategy for sustainable development aims to promote harmony among human beings and between humanity and nature... The pursuit of sustainable development requires:

• a political system that secures citizen participation in decision making
• an economic system that is able to generate surpluses and technical knowledge on a self-reliant and sustained basis
• a social system that provides for solutions for the tensions arising from disharmonious development
• a production system that respects the obligation to preserve the ecological base for development
• a technological system that can search continuously for new solutions
• an international system that fosters sustainable patterns of trade and finance
• an administrative system that is flexible and has the capacity for self correction

-World Commission on Environment and Development, 
Our Common Future, 1987

But the basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations to meet their own needs.

-World Commission on Environment and Development,
Our Common Future, 1987
quoted by Alan Durning in How Much Is Enough, 1992  

The only rational way of planning the country's national progress is through sustainable development: meeting the needs of citizens of today without limiting the options of future generations to fulfill their needs. It is development without destruction; it is the achievement of material progress without compromising the life-support functions of natural systems; it is the pursuit of higher levels of quality of life while preserving or even enhancing environmental quality. It is the only true development.

-Philippine Strategy For Sustainable Development, 1989

The transition to a sustainable future will require the vast majority of people be persuaded to adopt different lifestyles… Campaigns that rely solely on providing information often have little or no effect upon behavior.

-Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith, 
Fostering Sustainable Behavior:
An Introduction to Community-based Social Marketing, 1999

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.

-Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle, 1971

Because by definition they lack any sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another.  The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one’s own interest as far as possible.  Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint.  Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so.  The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

-Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character,”
The Unsettling of America 1977

In the past we could afford a long gestation period before undertaking major environmental policy initiatives. Today the time for a well-planned transition to a sustainable system is running out. We may be moving in the right direction, but we are moving too slowly. We are failing in our responsibility to future generations and even the present one.

-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from speech at conference
arranged by Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies,
Reuters Planet Ark 14 March 2001  

Light tomorrow with today!

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1851)

For three decades and longer we have been developing the ideas, science, and technological wherewithal to build a sustainable society.  The public knows of these things only in fragments, but not as a coherent and practical agenda—indeed the only practical course available.  That is our fault ad we should start now to put a positive agenda before the public that includes the human and economic advantages of better technology, integrated planning, coherent purposes, and foresight.

-David W. Orr, The Last Refuge, 2004

The planetary emergency unfolding around us is, first and foremost…a crisis of thought, values, perceptions, ideas and judgments. In other words, it is a crisis of mind, which makes it a crisis of those institutions which purport to improve minds.

-David W. Orr cited in 
Green Destiny: Penn State’s Emerging Ecological Mission, 2001

No institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary transition to a sustainable world than colleges and universities. They have access to the leaders of tomorrow and the leaders of today. What they do matters to the wider public.

-David W. Orr, The Last Refuge, 2004

Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

-Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, 10 Dec 2007

Genuine politics—politics worthy of the name—is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community, and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole…

-Václav Havel (b. 1936)

The salvation of the world lies in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility. We are still under the sway of destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it, and therefore, everything is permitted. We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions - if they are to be moral - is responsibility. Responsibility is something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

-Václav Havel (b. 1936) cited in The Polluters, 1993

The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments [trappings] of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.

-Václav Havel (b. 1936), The Power of the Powerless: 
Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane, 1985

Life is what we are alive to. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness, kindness, purity love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God, and eternal hope is to be all but dead.

-Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901)

At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God's creation and the one human family. It is about protecting both "the human environment" and the natural environment. It is about our human stewardship of God's creation and our responsibility to those who come after us.

–U.S. Catholic Bishops, Global Climate Change:
A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good, July 2001  

The words "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth, master it; and rule…the earth" (Gen 1:28) sting when they are misinterpreted to justify plundering the environment without regard for the consequences. Judaism's opposition to the wanton destruction of the environment holds that creation is an on-going process in which God and humans are co-partners in safe-guarding the earth's riches. That is why rabbinic tradition depicts God warning Adam: "See my world, how beautiful it is. Do not corrupt or destroy it, for if you do, there will be no one to set it right after you."

-Rabbi Stephen Pearce, Emanu-El, San Francisco, CA
quoted in Religion and the Forests, Spring 2000

We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well being of future generations.

-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), 
"The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility,"
U.S. Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C., 1990  

What does our generation owe to generations yet unborn? …there is an order in the universe which must be respected, and… the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations.

-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), 
Address to the Vatican Symposium on the Environment, 1990
quoted in Ecology and Faith: The Writings of Pope John Paul II,
ed. Sr. Ancilla Dent OSB, 1997

If humanity today succeeds in combining the new scientific capacities with a strong ethical dimension, it will certainly be able to promote the environment as a home and a resource for … all … and will be able to eliminate the causes of pollution and to guarantee adequate conditions of hygiene and health for small groups as well as for vast human settlements. Technology that pollutes can also cleanse, production that amasses can also distribute justly, on condition that the ethic of respect for life and human dignity, for the rights of today's generations and those to come, prevails.

-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), "The Environment and Health," Mar 97 
cited in L'Osservatore Romano, 9 Apr 97

In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts, and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources, and by a progressive decline in the quality of life. The sense of precariousness and insecurity that such a situation engenders is a seedbed for collective selfishness, disregard for others, and dishonesty. Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past…

-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), 
Message for the World Day of Peace, 1 Jan 1990

Yes, the South—becoming always poorer—and the North—becoming always richer …Richer, too in the resources of weapons with which the superpowers and blocs can mutually threaten each other. In the light of Christ’s words (Mt. 25), this poor South will judge the rich North. And the poor people and poor nations—poor in different ways, not only lacking food, but also deprived of freedom and other human rights—will judge those people who take these goods away from them, amassing to themselves the imperialist monopoly and political supremacy at the expense of others.

-Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), Edmonton, Ontario 
quoted in John F. Kavanaugh’s 
Following Christ in a Consumer Society, 1996 p xxiii

One of the buzz words of recent years has been sustainability and like all buzzwords it tends to be used annoyingly all over the place often for things it doesn’t really fit. But what the word points to is the sense of obligation that most of us share at some deep level. The obligation to hand on to our children and grandchildren a legacy that helps them live and flourish. Building to last is something we all understand. And if we live in a context where we construct everything from computers to buildings to relationships on the assumption that they'll need to be replaced before long, what have we lost? …Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams,
New Year’s Message posted on YouTube 31 Dec 07

The English preacher, Richard Cecil wrote: "Selfishness will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on." At the end of the day, after everybody has pleaded that he was only exercising his own God-given rights, that is just what an excess of selfishness could be instrumental in doing. The underlying message from the Earth Summit in Brazil was that the nations of this earth simply cannot continue polluting its atmosphere, land and water as they have up to now. Genuine, substantive and massive sacrifices will have to be made to put the world on the path of sustainable development. In the long run, a willingness to make sacrifices may be all that stands between the human race and catastrophe. Selfishness or survival - which is it to be?

-Royal Bank of Canada, Letter, September 1992
from Peter's Pearls, Peter Stafford Sumner, anthologist  

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Trumpet of Conscience, 1967

An embrace of holy "earth-poverty," a willingness to accept living standards at a sustainable level, should be an important element in our environmental future. Stewardship shows itself in a temperate and moderate lifestyle.

–Edgar Castellini, "St. Francis: A Model for Stewardship,"
EcoStewards Journal, Summer 1999

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.

-Leviticus 19:9-10 from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

-William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 Jun 90 *

To build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of, but to add a few yards of land to your field, to plant an orchard, or enlarge a dwelling, to always be making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven.

-Alex de Tocqueville (1805-1859), 
Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve 1945 ch 11

If the life-supporting ecosystems of the planet are to survive for future generations, the consumer society will have to dramatically curtail its use of resources - partly by shifting to high-quality, low-input durable goods and partly by seeking fulfillment through leisure, human relationships, and other nonmaterial avenues. We in the consumer society will have to live a technologically sophisticated version of the life-style currently practiced lower on the economic ladder. Scientific advances, better laws, grassroots campaigns - all can help us get there. But ultimately, sustaining the environment that sustains humanity will require that we change our values.

-Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough, 1992  

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure -- but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

-Edmund Burke (1729-1797), 
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsel of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters

-Edmund Burke (1729-1797), 
A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

We have staked the whole future of the American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future...upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves, according to the Ten Commandments of God.

-James Madison (1751-1836), 4th U.S. President  

Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.

-John R.W. Stott, 
cited in Forward of Peter Harris's Under the Bright Wings, 1993.

A sustainable economy represents nothing less than a higher social order—one as concerned with future generations as with our own, and more focused on the health of the planet and the poor than on material acquisitions and military might. While it is a fundamentally new endeavor, with many uncertainties, it is far less risky than continuing with business as usual.

-Lester Brown, Sandra Postel, & Christopher Flavin,
Saving the Planet: Reshaping the Global Economy, 1991  

The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on.

-Winona LaDuke, cited in "Native Activists", Cascadia Planet, 
by Patrick Mazza, 23 Jul 2000

How could we even begin to disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced. If we do not have the strength to do any of this, could we perhaps stop applauding the type of economic "progress" which palpably lacks the basis of permanence and give what modest support we can to those who, unafraid of being denounced as cranks, work for non-violence: as conservationists, ecologists, protectors of wildlife, promoters of organic agriculture, distributists, cottage producers, and so forth? An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.

-E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977), Small Is Beautiful, 1973  

We recognize that our progress as a species does not have to be defined in terms of wealth or material and physical growth any more than our progress as individuals has to be defined in terms of physical growth. Physical growth of the body reaches a limit, but the character and the soul of the individual continues to grow, or at least has a chance to continue, often to our last breath. It is simple minded to define our well being in material terms, when that well-being has an aesthetic dimension, and intellectual dimension, a moral dimension.

-Wes Jackson, "Building a Sustainable Society," 
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987

Humanity has created many thousands of culture that didn't destroy their own habitat. They were sustainable societies, and they often had some kind of cultural awareness of the importance of sustainability. We don't have those ecological values. Structurally, we in urban-industrial society are despoiling our own nest, which itself could be considered suicidal or ecocidal. And we know we are doing it. There's a real psychological component to the kind of behavior where you purposely do things you know are damaging to yourself. There are clear terms psychologists use to describe that kind of behavior. So why isn't psychology involved in this?

-Allen Kanner, Ecopsychology, 1995

Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the plowing season and harvest you must rest.

-Exodus 34:21 NIV Bible

The basis of Western civilization is the amassing of wealth through the exploitation of nature.

-John McKenzie, The Civilization of Christianity, 1986

Scientific or technological "solutions" which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction. Ever-bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.

-E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973

Herein is revealed the tragedy of nearly fifty years of economic growth and national development. Rather than building societies that create a good life for sustainers and bring the deprived into the sustainer class, we have followed the path of encouraging over consumers to consume more, converting sustainers into over consumers, and pushing many of those in the sustainer class into the excluded class.

-Nestor Garcia Canclini
quoted in David C. Korten's When Corporations Rule the World, 1996

What is urgently needed is a bold new move from a consumer economy to a conserver economy in all of the developed countries, and particularly in the United States.

-Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

-Brooks Stevens quoted in Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, 1960

The United States is the world’s largest polluter and also its biggest consumer of global energy supplies. These habits go directly against biblical directions for stewardship of the earth. Many called the attacks of September 11 an “attack on the Western way of life.” The World Trade Center and the Pentagon are symbols of American life, and that is precisely why they were attacked. There is a perception around the world that the United States perpetuates unfair trade policies through both economic policy and military force that benefit western countries at the expense of millions of lives in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. As U.S. citizens we have a choice. We can continue to protect our own very high standard of living and continue to center our economy on consumption. Or we can take steps to use less of the world’s resources, and to develop economic policies and institutions that focus on a global living wage, sustainable environments, and a reduced focus on consumption. We have an opportunity now to rebuild and reconstruct these American monuments in a way that addresses global perceptions and criticisms.

-Lisa Schirch & J. Daryl Byler, 
“Effective and Faithful Security Strategies,” from At Peace and Unafraid, 
ed. Duane K. Friesen & Gerald W. Schlabach, 2005

Entranced by promises of a material paradise of limitless luxury, humanity has too long ignored the mismatch between the imperatives of our existence as living beings on a finite planet and the imperatives of the institutions of money that chart our path to the future. Created to build colonial empires in service to kings, global corporations are ill suited to the task of building just, sustainable, and compassionate civil societies that nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for the whole of life. Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

-David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 1995

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

-Barbara Ehrenreich, “Premature Pragmatism,” 
The Worst Years of Our Lives, 1991

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

-Karl Kraus (1874–1936), “In These Great Times,” Die Fackel, Dec 1914

If being wealthy is taken to mean having the means to satisfy one's every want, all but the very poor can become rich as though at a single stroke of a magician's wand, simply by ceasing to want more than is really necessary for sustaining life. By being content with little and not giving a rap for what the neighbours think, one can attain a very large measure of freedom, shedding care and worry in a trice.

-John Blofeld (1913-1987)

Just as peace in our hearts must lead us to be peacemakers in a world at war, so also must that peace in our hearts lead us to be peacemakers in a world that is at war with the very biotic, genetic, chemical and physical structures of creation. In this war Christians are called to be conscientious objectors. Christians will seek to be ecological peacemakers through their political activism, their patterns of consumption, the way they heat their homes and churches, the materials they use in constructing homes and churches, the way they deal with their waste, the cleaning products they use, and the kinds of technology they employ.

-Brian Walsh & Sylvia C. Keesmaat, 
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 2004

Graciousness, courtesy, compassion—this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on. The whole point of this instruction was that our dominion over the earth and the little creatures that creep upon it is to be filled with compassion. We should not rape the earth but manage and care for it—kindly, lovingly, tenderly. This too is social justice.

-Richard J. Foster, Streams of Living Water, 1998

We who have lost our sense and our senses our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things; without rest for the body or spirit, hurting our earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again.

the United Nations Environmental Sabbath Program

[B]usiness does have an ethical responsibility, even when not required by law and not demanded by consumers, to redesign its operations in a way that is ecologically and economically sustainable over the long-term. Environmental responsibilities should provide the direction in which business develops as well as the constraints within which it operates. I suggest that this goal ought to be conceived of as the telos of business institutions in the twenty-first century. Sustainability, meeting the real needs of presently living human beings without jeopardizing the ability of future people to meet their own needs, represents the twenty-first century’s Common Good.

-Joseph DesJardins, Doing Well by Doing Good, 
Paper presented at The Good Company: “Catholic Social Thought 
and Corporate Social Responsibility in Dialogue" 
Pontifical University of St. Thomas, Rome, Italy, 5-7 Oct 2006

Just as the detritus of decomposed material is turned back into fertile soil within biological systems, sustainable business must be designed so that its by-products are themselves the resources for new productivity.

-Joseph DesJardins, Doing Well by Doing Good, 
Paper presented at The Good Company: “Catholic Social Thought 
and Corporate Social Responsibility in Dialogue" 
Pontifical University of St. Thomas, Rome, Italy, 5-7 Oct 2006

For too long, business (and growth-based economics) has treated the productive capacity of the earth’s biosphere as an unending revenue stream. Earth’s productivity was something that could be spent without cost. Only in the last few decades have the true costs of spending down our natural capital been understood. The better metaphor is to think of the earth’s productivity as capital, as something capable of generating revenue in the form of interest but not something that should be spent to the point where it is incapable of continuing to be a source of income. A prudent financial strategy is to spend interest but not capital. The earth has demonstrated a remarkable ability to produce life-sustaining necessities indefinitely, but only if we maintain sufficient savings in reserve to generate these necessities indefinitely.

-Joseph DesJardins, Doing Well by Doing Good, 
Paper presented at The Good Company: “Catholic Social Thought 
and Corporate Social Responsibility in Dialogue" 
Pontifical University of St. Thomas, Rome, Italy, 5-7 Oct 2006

The gains made by better management and technology are still being outpaced by the environmental impacts of population and economic growth. We are on an unsustainable course.

-Klaus Toepfer, head of the United Nations Environment Program
cited in Rueters 22 Sept 99

We know what we have to do. And we know how to do it. If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration. Simply stated, if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so.

-Lester R. Brown, State of the World, 1993  

The earthly result of human sin has been a perverted stewardship, a patchwork of garden and wasteland in which the waste is increasing. "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land...Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away" (Hosea 4:1,3). Thus, one consequence of our misuse of the earth is an unjust denial of God's created bounty to other human beings, both now and in the future.

-from An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation
The Evangelical Environmental Network 1994

When we conduct agriculture, we are, therefore, altering the ecological arrangement that was responsible for our genesis as a species. I think that this is the reason that this alienation has allowed us to see and regard land mostly as a resource. So we have created a problem for ourselves from the word "go," for land is not a resource any more than humans are resources. Call chrome a resource or petroleum a resource, but not land or people. The concept of resources is restricted to the notion of utility. Land and people transcend a one-dimensional definition that makes economics primary. But when economics is regarded as the brightest star in the constellation of considerations, economic problems are inevitable, for as Thoreau once noted. "the world is more beautiful than it is useful." Should anyone's suggestions for a sustainable agriculture be trusted who doesn't believe that?

-Wes Jackson, Meeting the Expectations of the Land, 1984  

Some of the elements of the Judeo-Christian message lie in this economy of nature. The model is inherently biological. The two major models at work today, capitalism and the Soviet and Chinese brands of socialism, are industrial. Christ's metaphors are biological or cultural. He spoke of the vine and the branches, of fish and fishermen. His parables have to do with what is alive, not dead wood or iron or bronze. The Christian message, like an ecosystem, is about process. In an ecological sense, the cross symbolizes a willingness to die so that the continuation of life might be served. Now we must extend our love to the unborn if we are to serve eternal life.

-Wes Jackson, Building a Sustainable Society,
Altars of Unhewn Stone, 1987  

But we are finding- to our embarrassment- that much of our makings cannot be sustained, that our creations have been bought at the expense of Creation, through degrading, expending, destroying the larger Creation which sustains us.

-Dr. Calvin B. DeWitt, 
The Importance for Life and Vocation of Being at Au Sable Institute

So long as we are under the illusion that we know best what is good for the earth and for ourselves, then we will continue our present course, with its devastating consequences on the entire Earth community... We need only listen to what the Earth is telling us... the time has come when we will listen, or we will die.

- Fr Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 1988  

© 2008 University of St. Thomas, Minnesota USA
All rights reserved.