Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.
Interpretation
An environmental revolution demands sacrifices for significant benefits over time.
This quote by Donella Meadows emphasizes the transformative potential of an environmental revolution, suggesting that while it requires significant sacrifices and may take a long time to manifest, the changes it invokes can fundamentally reshape our world, including our institutions and cultures. However, it also acknowledges the uncertainty of such a revolution actually occurring, underscoring that such a future is not guaranteed.
In practice
In a speech on climate action, one might say, 'Like the other great revolutions, remember that an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains.'
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
Speak the truth._x000D_ Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,_x000D_ and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power._x000D_ Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence._x000D_ All growth is not good._x000D_ The environment is a necessity, not a luxury._x000D_ There is such a thing as enough.
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]
To be anti-racist you have to be actively a part of dismantling the systems that surround you and the systems that you benefit from.
There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.
Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
The growth of trees and plants takes place so slowly that it is not easily seen. Daily we notice little change. But, in course of time, we see that a great change has taken place. So it is with grace. Sanctification is a progressive, lifelong work (Prov 4:18). It is an amazing work of God's grace and it is a work to be prayed for (Rom 8:27).
For reforms ameliorate the situation of the working class, they lighten the weight of the chains labour is burdened with by capitalism, but they are not sufficient to crush capitalism and to emancipate the workers from their tyranny.
People are very hungry for something new. I think they are interested in being called to be a part of something larger than the sort of small, petty, slash-and-burn politics that we have been seeing over the last several years.
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