Quotes from Bill McKibben

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.

I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.

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

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

if there is any one subject on which everyone seems to agree, any one point of doctrine to which every political sect subscribes, it's that "economic growth" is the highest goal, our ultimate goal as a country. and not only as a country-as states, as communities, as corporations, as individuals.

One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion.

I've sat behind a microphone and listened for decades as Americans learned to stop talking with each other and start shouting instead. No discussions, just 'socialist' or 'fascist' or 'feminazi' or 'bigot' or whatever. So here's what I want to say, and I think it's the one thing no one ever says any more in our public life: I think you're wrong, but you may be right .

Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.

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

If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask.

So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it's the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can't solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.

A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.

electronic media have become an environment of their own- to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live. and the problem is not that it exists- the problem is that it supplants. it's simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom.

the inexhaustible pages of nature Ã¢â'¬Â¦ written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence.

But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn't ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway.

Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question.

the mountain and the television weren't so much in different time zones as in different dimensions.

A single farmers' market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers' markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy

a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already

Let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things.

The human game is a team sport.

The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about global warming; it came out in 1989 and soon appeared in more than twenty languages. At the time, the available data on climate change still fit on the top of my desk. What's astonishing is that twenty years later most of the predictions scientists were then making have proved too conservative.

The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth's surface - some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop - is a thousand times more hospitable that the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter.

Few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go into the making of our climates and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale. In the following paper I hope to show that such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring at the present time.