Best Bill McKibben Quotes
- TV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're… Accused
- If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a… College
- You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're… All
- 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… Bigger
- You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet Balance
- We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s) Both
- If we all used clotheslines, we could save 30 million tons of coal a year, or shut down 15 nuclear power plants. And you don't… Afternoon
- The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield. Congress
- 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… Earth
- If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage. From
- We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to. All
- A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires. Abilities
- We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a… Any
- 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… Advancement
- We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may… Aesthetic
- 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… All
- "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.… Ball
- 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… Argument
- We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings… Altering
- 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… Carbon
- The models that have been constructed agree that when, as has been predicted, the level of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in other greenhouse gases… Agree
- 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… Affluent
- what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors. Day
- 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… Bad
- 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… Almost Certainly