Bill McKibben Quotes

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.

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

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

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

In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They'll just ask, "So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?"

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.

Profiting from companies that are overloading the atmosphere with carbon and changing the atmosphere is wrong.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

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

I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.

For the first time in 150 years, the USDA reported there were more farms in America, not fewer. That has to make you happy.

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.

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.

I think fracking for gas will reduce the incentive to turn to renewables, and I think it will do a lot of other damage across the countryside.

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

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

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

Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.

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.

We've built a new Earth. It's not as nice as the old one; it's the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever.

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold, and so the atmosphere is about 4% wetter than it was 40 years ago. This loads the dice for flood and drought, and we're seeing both in stunning abundance.

According to new research emerging from many quarters that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually

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

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

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

Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.

I'm far less a leader than a writer.

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

Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.

The earth is a museum of divine intent.

In the last two years 24 countries have set new all-time temperature records. We've seen flooding on an epic scale in every continent .

If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.

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