Top 87 Mckibben Quotes
#1. We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
Bill McKibben
#2. 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
Bill McKibben
#4. The roof of my house is covered in solar panels. When I'm home, I'm a pretty green fellow.
Bill McKibben
#5. We use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
Bill McKibben
#6. But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
Bill McKibben
#7. 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.
Bill McKibben
#8. 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 discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
Bill McKibben
#9. The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
Bill McKibben
#10. 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 planet on which to make use of their degree.
Bill McKibben
#11. Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
Bill McKibben
#12. We can't bankrupt Exxon. But we can politically and morally bankrupt them.
Bill McKibben
#13. 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!
Bill McKibben
#14. If a dog can love us unconditionally, why can't we love each other in the same way?
Carol McKibben
#15. Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free
Bill McKibben
#16. Money supplants skill; it's possession allows us to become happily stupid.
Bill McKibben
#17. 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.
Bill McKibben
#18. The television culture celebrates incompetence.
Bill McKibben
#19. 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?"
Bill McKibben
#20. Our criteria is that it's okay to invest in companies so long as they stop lobbying in Washington, stop exploring for new hydrocarbons, and sit down with every one else to plan to keep 80 percent of the reserves in the ground.
Bill McKibben
#21. Only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.
Bill McKibben
#22. It drives me crazy to see so much of this planet's life so casually endangered. The first steps are so easy (drive smaller cars, for instance) that it's very hard to understand why we haven't taken them. But I know that this is the issue our generation will be judged by.
Bill McKibben
#23. 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.
Bill McKibben
#24. We build schools and give government loans and grants to college kids; for those of us who are parents, tuition will often be the last big subsidy we give the children we've raised.
Bill McKibben
#25. 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.
Bill McKibben
#26. We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.
Bill McKibben
#27. The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.
Bill McKibben
#28. A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
Bill McKibben
#29. 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
Bill McKibben
#30. Management of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.
Bill McKibben
#31. A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
Bill McKibben
#32. Most of the men and women who vote in Congress each year to continue subsidies have taken campaign donations from big energy companies.
Bill McKibben
#33. 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.
Bill McKibben
#34. It's a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.
Bill McKibben
#35. 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 plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
Bill McKibben
#36. Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that's actually nonsense.
Bill McKibben
#37. 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.
Bill McKibben
#38. What you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
Bill McKibben
#39. 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.
Bill McKibben
#40. There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
Bill McKibben
#41. 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?
Bill McKibben
#43. 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.
Bill McKibben
#44. 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.
Bill McKibben
#45. TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
Bill McKibben
#46. With each month that passes, a solar panel gets 2 or 3 percent cheaper. So while we're holding the fossil fuel industry in check, the engineers in the renewable energy world are undercutting them from the other side.
Bill McKibben
#47. 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.
Bill McKibben
#48. 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.
Bill McKibben
#49. When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
Bill McKibben
#50. 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.
Bill McKibben
#51. We can either save the planet from catastrophic warming, or protect fossil fuel CEOs. Not both. Do the math(s)
Bill McKibben
#52. We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor
by giving each other motorized tie racks.
Bill McKibben
#53. We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn.
Bill McKibben
#54. There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.
Bill McKibben
#55. The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.
Bill McKibben
#56. 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.
Bill McKibben
#57. 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.
Bill McKibben
#58. 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.
Bill McKibben
#59. My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that's ever happened, and yet people's understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.
Bill McKibben
#60. 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.
Bill McKibben
#61. After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.
Bill McKibben
#62. 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
Bill McKibben
#63. 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.
Bill McKibben
#64. 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.
Bill McKibben
#65. In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that's going on every single day.
Bill McKibben
#66. Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
Bill McKibben
#67. 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.
Bill McKibben
#68. 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.
Bill McKibben
#69. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
Bill McKibben
#70. Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality.
Bill McKibben
#71. 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.
Bill McKibben
#72. 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 have to wait to start. Yours could be up by this afternoon. To be specific, buy 50 feet of clothesline and a $3 bag of clothespins and become a solar energy pioneer.
Bill McKibben
#73. 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.
Bill McKibben
#74. 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.
Bill McKibben
#75. Pity the poor senator or representative trying to stay alive in the political jungle. At every turn, there's a danger: a constituent who actually wants something done. Or worse, a campaign donor who might be offended by that something.
Bill McKibben
#76. 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.
Bill McKibben
#77. What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben
#78. These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
Bill McKibben
#79. There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.
Bill McKibben
#80. I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.
Bill McKibben
#81. 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.
Bill McKibben
#82. "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.
Bill McKibben
#83. Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when
you're running yourself.
Bill McKibben
#84. We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.
Bill McKibben
#85. We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.
Bill McKibben
#86. The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
Bill McKibben
#87. If it's wrong to wreck the planet, it's wrong to profit from the wreckage.
Bill McKibben
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