...the core values that underpin sustainable development - interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice - are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed
Interpretation
Sustainable development relies on core values like empathy and responsibility for building a better future.
This quote emphasizes the fundamental values necessary for sustainable development, arguing that principles like interdependence and intergenerational justice are crucial for fostering a better world. It suggests that without these values, any attempt to create a sustainable and equitable future will lack a solid foundation and ultimately be ineffective.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, one might quote this to emphasize the ethical responsibilities we have towards future generations.
The collapse of the world's banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today
We're never going to scare people into living more sustainably! We have to be able to demonstrate just how dynamic and aspirational such a world could be
Any regeneration project that fails to put environmental and social benefits at its very heart is unlikely to achieve anything more than a very short-lived spasm of spurious prosperity
As more and more people wake up to the fact that further growth does not necessarily bring improvements in quality of life (and often exactly the opposite), sustainability is going to become one of the key characteristics with which places want to be associated.
The future will be green, or not at all
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
There is nothing but water in the holy pools. I know, I have been swimming there. All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word. I know, I have been crying out to them. The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words. I looked through their covers one day sideways. What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through. If you have not lived through something, it is not true.
For 12 long years I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the 'straightjacket world' created by my strong belief that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger direct from God Himself, and my faith in what I now see to be a pseudo-religious philosophy that he preaches.... I shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in him even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.
A person's a person, no matter how small.
In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.
I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.
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