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After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.
Maurice Strong
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Sustainability involves managing the Earth's resources responsibly, similar to how a corporation manages its assets.

Maurice Strong's quote emphasizes the importance of treating the Earth as a valuable asset that must be maintained and preserved. Just as a corporation tracks and manages its resources through financial practices, we must apply similar principles to our natural environment to ensure its health and longevity for future generations.

Themes

SustainabilityEnvironmentNatural CapitalResourcesPreservation

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in environmental policy discussions to highlight the economic perspective of sustainability.

More from Maurice Strong

Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?
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The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.
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A citizen of an advanced industrialized nation consumes in six months the energy and raw materials that have to last the citizen of a developing country his entire lifetime.
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