Amanda Janoo: “Humans are capable of really big scale change, really fast”

Dana Gulley: “If we don’t first name a vision, we are destined towards incrementalism”

“Address it with your assets”

Hunter Lovins: “Dana Meadows (author of Limits to Growth, and first user of the term “Sustainability”) said Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress…The best goal most of us who work toward sustainability offer is the avoidance of catastrophe. We promise survival and not much more. That is a failure of vision… Dana also said: “People don’t need enormous cars; they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement, variety, and beauty. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy. To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth. A society that can admit and articulate its nonmaterial needs and find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment”…. “Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward — a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic.” 

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

“If you’ve had an economics class, this shit’s in your head”

Hunter Lovins: “Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by actions of human beings.” – Nelson Mandela

“I had the chance to hear Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. speak recently. He explained that the heart of allyship is asking yourself “what is your perception of justice for all?” How do we shift away from (usually) white liberals focusing on doing things “for” racial justice and instead working “with” communities to make a more just society. I would love to hear the panel’s thoughts on allyship in the economic context.”