Bill McKibben Quotes

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.

Last year, the USDA said for the first time in 150 years that there were more farms in America instead of fewer. I think that's the single most hopeful statistic I know.

The end of nature sours all my material pleasures. The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me. And yet it is toward such a world that our belief in endless material advancement hurries us. As long as that desire drives us, here is no way to set limits.

In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.

The religious environmental movement is potentially key to dealing with the greatest problem humans have ever faced, and it has never been captured with more breadth and force than in RENEWAL. I hope this movie is screened in church basements and synagogue social halls across the country, and that it moves many more people of faith off the fence and into action.

A writer doesn't owe a reader hope - the only obligation is honesty...

In fact, corporations are the infants of our society - they know very little except how to grow (though they're very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It's about time we took it up again.

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

The constant flow of images undercuts the sense that there's actually something wrong with the world. How can there really be a shortage of whooping cranes when you've seen a thousand images of them - seen ten times more images than there are actually whooping cranes left in the wild?

The television culture celebrates incompetence.

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.

The snow was coming down so hard. It looked like the flakes were hurrying to get out of the sky so the next ones would have room to fall.

There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.

What you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.

The Arctic and the Antarctic are melting quickly. We may have waited too long to get started. But this is a day for optimism because the battle is fully joined, and the idea that big oil is unbeatable is no longer true.

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

We all need to be reminded that democracy isn't just voting for the president every four years and then trusting him to fix things. Democracy is about getting together with your community to think together about your future.

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place

If there's horrible flooding in Pakistan or a horrible heat wave in Texas, we're no longer able to call it an act of God, or a natural disaster, or something like that, the way we could have through all of human history until 35 or 40 years ago.

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.

There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us ... God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.

There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.

Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.

If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!

Very few people on earth ever get to say: "I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing." If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say.

All the things that we've done as a species have had a limited scope. We're talking about melting the ice caps, raising the level of the seas dramatically, changing the distribution of every other species on Earth, perhaps wiping out one-third or half of them. The changes at work are geologic in scale. The level of change required to deal with it is enormous, too. It will require change in every country. It will require a degree of global cooperation that we haven't seen before.

Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

Without a movement pressing for change, there's little hope. We've got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.

I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.

If we were built, what were we built for? ... Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?

What we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put ourselves.

It ensured that I'd never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites.

Often when I'm on TV, they'll ask what are the three most important things for people to do. I know they want me to say that people should change their light bulbs. I say the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.

"Science," of course, replaced "God" as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.

We can't bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them.

Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.

There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day.

Only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.

Remember ... this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in US history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas ... This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.

We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor
by giving each other motorized tie racks.

Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.

If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn't pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet.

The real negotiation is between humans on the one hand and chemistry and physics on the other. And chemistry and physics, unfortunately, don't bargain.

If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate.

Because the financial power of the fossil-fuel industry is so great it can, and has, delayed any real action of the climate issues almost everywhere.

The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I'm home, I'm a pretty green fellow.

The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.

The earth is a museum of divine intent.

There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.

The popular notion is that Americans are addicted to fossil fuels, but I find that's not true; most people would be happy to power their lives with anything else.

We're not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it's too late for that. We're trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide - once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we've probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.

Increasingly we live in a world filled with the equivalents of deadly garage-door openers, unnecessary items that offer us mild and insipid comfort at the price of a dangerous and uncomfortable planet, and at the price of any real relationship to the physical world. if you live in a suburban home and commute to a parking garage somewhere, that ten seconds of opening the garage door(manually) might be nearly the only rain you ever feel.

Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when
you're running yourself.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.

Where people aren't as deeply reliant on fossil fuel as in the United States, it's far easier for them to imagine change on this scale. When you go to Europe, they're much more ready. They use half the amount of energy per capita that we use. They can imagine using less than that. They see the benefits. They're ready to go.

A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.

Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.

These things are happening in large measure because of us. We in this country burn 25 percent of the world's fossil fuel, create 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide. It is us - it is the affluent lifestyles that we lead that overwhelmingly contribute to this problem. And to call it a problem is to understate what it really is. Which is a crime. Crime against the poorest and most marginalized people on this planet. We've never figured out, though God knows we've tried, a more effective way to destroy their lives.

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

Everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.