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Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City QUOTES

Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City QUOTES

1 " Yet it has to be recognized that these checklists conform to managerial norms of measuring sustainability because they are made up of easily quantifiable items: more solar roofs, less airborne particulates; more transit riders, less water use per capital; more housing density, less golf courses. Greening the world, from this standpoint, suggests that the ecological crisis can be fixed by making slight technical adjustments to people's habits and interactions with their daily environments. When sustainability is defined by a set of metrics, it reflects a purely physical understanding of how societies strive to be ecologically resilient. By contrast, there are no indexes for measuring environmental justice, no indicators for judging equity of access to the green life, and no technical quantum for assessing the social sustainability of a population. The vogue for green governance by the numbers is a recipe for managing, rather than correcting, inequality. "

― Andrew Ross , Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

2 " In retrospect, it is fair to conclude that the message of Limits to Growth was not ignored. It did get through to the elites for whom it was prepared, and they responded by squirreling away whatever resources they could carry off from the commonwealth. Denial is the term commonly used to describe resistance to evidence of climate change and other ecological threats. Yet the cumulative record of this steady pillage suggests the opposite has been occurring. "

― Andrew Ross , Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City