“If we the generation that faces the next century, don’t do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.”
Petra Kelly (Co-founder of the German Green Party)
‘‘Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.’’
Aldous Huxley, Island
“in a nutshell, the great challenge of our time is to create sustainable communities – that is to say, social and cultural environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances for future generations”
Fritjof Capra (1996: 4)
“Take responsibility for an unknown future”
Paul Cilliers, (1998: 139)
“Sustainable communities are build through emphasising learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change”
(Walker & Salt, 2006: 147).
“Ecovillages, and the larger social movements of which they are an integral part, are the most promising and important intentional community movement in all of history”
Robert Rosenthal, Professor of Philosophy at Hanover College
Within the sustainability movement, and particularly within cities, “replication and transformation is unlikely until the process of ‘conscious evolution’ within these locals has matured over time to a point where they represent alternatives that are self evidently preferable to an increasingly unviable status quo”.
Professor Mark Swilling (2004a: 19)
“Development is about improvements in the quality of life and embodies the satisfaction of material and non-material human needs”
For Gallopin (2003: 36)
“Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, drying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more powerful storms, disappearing species, and soon, shrinking oil supplies”
(Lester Brown, L. 2006: 5)
“If economic progress is to be maintained and humanity is to succeed rather than collapse, we will need to replace the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centred, throwaway economy with a new economic model”
(Lester Brown, L. 2006: 5)
“If globalisation is now at the root of so many problems, localisation – a shift away from the global and towards the local – is an obvious part of the solution”
Helena Norberg-Hodge (2000: 5)
“If we build a rich enough set of ecological concerns into the very epistemology of design, we may create a coherent response to the environmental crisis”
Sim Van Der Ryn and Cowan, 1996: 10).
“One-fifth of the world’s topsoil has been eroded away and nearly one-third of croplands have been lost to land degradation in just the past 40 years”
(Myers, 2000)
“Approximately 75 percent of the world’s agricultural diversity has been lost in the last century”
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
“Ecological design is not an alternative to dominant technology and design, [but] is the best path for their necessary evolution”
Van Der Ryn and Cowan
“Permaculture can be thought of as a global concept and a creative design response to a world of declining energy and resource availability”
(Holmgren, 2002)
“Permaculture is about what we want to do and can do, rather than what we oppose – an approach that is ethical, pragmatic, philosophical and technical”
(Holmgren, 2002)
“Permaculture is about consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs”
(Holmgren, 2002: xix)
“An engagement with the arts should not be a luxury in which we indulge after ‘work’, it should be intertwined with our work”
Paul Cilliers (2000: 32)
“I have developed over the years, a growing conviction that a journey a little deeper into this African primal forest (which Western man fears so much and has made us – its children – fear too!) could, even as it has done for the archaeologists, bring us face to face with the spiritual (religious) ancestry of all mankind and help us better to understand the forces in which we – all mankind – ‘live and move and have our being’”.
South African theologian Gabriel Setiloane