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 arenβt designed to produce them, if we donβt 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]
You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.
What we are living with is the result of human choices and it can be changed by making better, wiser choices.
As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.
The very notion that millions of workers displaced by the re-engineering and automation of the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors can be retrained to be scientists, engineers, technicians, executives, consultants, teachers, lawyers and the like, and then somehow find the appropriate number of job openings in the very narrow high-tech sector, seems at best a pipe dream, and at worst a delusion.
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
You knew me. You knew that person, but you don't know the person I'm trying to become... You are not your past!
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