Alex Steffen Quotes

Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the '60s and '70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist.

Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

At its very heart, Worldchanging is about using the best of people's new ideas, bringing them together and applying them to the massive problems that we all face.

The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

There's more to being an environmentalist than occasionally signing an online petition and mailing your check to the Sierra Club. Really the most effective environmental actions you can take have to do with crafting your home and surroundings, your workplace decisions and your investment habits.

Powerful people doing bad things LIKE cynical, despairing citizens.

Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.

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.

Cities generate most of the global economy, and most of its energy use, resource demands and climate emissions. How we build cities over the next decades will largely determine whether we can deliver a bright green future.

Copenhagen has done a remarkable job creating streets that are focused on bicycles and pedestrians.

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.

More is not better. Better is better. You don't need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don't need more stuff; you need stuff you'll actually use.

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO2 reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

The planet's biggest problems have to do with sustainability, environmental decline, global poverty, disease, conflict and so forth. Really, they're all interconnected - it's one big problem, which is that the way we're doing things can't go on.

There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.

In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that's an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.

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.

We're becoming a planet of a thousand new major cities. The economy of the 21st century is a city-building economy. It's within our power to make it a carbon zero one, too; and to be blunt, civilization depends on our success.

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.

The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.

If we're talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it's the only universal strategy that works.

It's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got.

There's a lot of evidence that shows that if we push as hard as we need to for net-zero emissions, we'll find ourselves with cities that are more secure, healthier, and have more economic opportunity - are frankly better cities to live in - than if we settle for the status quo.

To be young and aware is to know you're being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.

There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

By looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're setting ourselves up not to solve it.

I'm fascinated with design. I realized early that I had no talent in that direction, but I love talking with architects and designers about what they do. I appreciate applied creativity as a source of pleasure and meaning.

We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

You don't change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of 'Save the Earth' bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster.

Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there.

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.

For most people, using the Internet broadens their sense of who 'we' is and actually ends up leaving us in a place of greater compassion and understanding. It leaves us more connected to a larger group of people and more at one with a lot more people in our community.

I think there's a gigantic generation gap in terms of how people understand the Internet and how much they think technology is an important factor in social change.