Quotes from Bill McKibben

in fact American carbon dioxide emissions were expected to fall nearly 5 percent in 2009.47 Which is good news. Just not good enough. To give you an idea of how aggressively the world's governments are willing to move, in July 2009 the thirteen largest emitters met in Washington to agree on an "aspirational" goal of 50 percent cuts in carbon by 2050, which falls pretty close to the category of "don't bother.

Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads).

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

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

we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.

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.

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.

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

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

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

the television culture celebrates incompetence.

money supplants skill; it's possession allows us to become happily stupid.

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.

I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.

TV was like a third parent- a source of ideas and information and impressions. and not such a bad parent- always with time to spare, always eager to please, often funny.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

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

when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster, and if we can do so without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better.

It's a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.