Cities offer us powerful leverage on our most stubborn, wasteful practices. Long commutes in our cars, big power bills from our energy-hogging buildings, shopping trips to buy stuff that’ll spend a few short months in our homes and long centuries in our landfills. Alex Steffen Read Quote
People – especially the geeks who created it – have tended to look at the Internet as something that’s hermetically sealed: there’s the Internet and the rest of the world. But that’s not how people want to use the Internet. They want to use it as a way of better navigating the real world. Alex Steffen Read Quote
We don’t need more recycling, we need a completely different system of closed-loop manufacturing, and no matter how many cans I crush, my personal actions at the consumer level are of very little importance in getting us there. Alex Steffen Read Quote
It is very possible to have lives that are just as prosperous, and nicer, that use 5 percent of the fossil fuels and virgin materials we do now. But if we’re living anything like the average McMansion-ite, SUV-driving suburbanites, there’s simply no way that can be powered in a climate-friendly way. Alex Steffen Read Quote
The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it. Alex Steffen Read Quote
The most climate friendly trip we are ever going to take is the trip we never had to take because we were close to what we wanted. Alex Steffen Read Quote
We already have many of the technologies and tools that we need to build a sustainable future. What we don’t have is a new way of thinking, and that’s really the hardest part. Alex Steffen Read Quote
If nothing else, the Internet allows people to put their ideas out there and let the world decide whether they’re worth paying attention to. Alex Steffen Read Quote
If people are given the opportunity to really make a difference in their own lives, their own communities, their own businesses and their own governments, then we can really transform the prospects of life on this planet. We can find ourselves living in a world that is more like the world that I think most of us want to be living in. Alex Steffen Read Quote
It’s not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it’s health in our absence: it’s more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence. Alex Steffen Read Quote
