We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path [in Mediated Modeling page 43]

I call the transformed world toward which we can move ‘sustainable,’ by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.

A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.