Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben
William Ernest "Bill" McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the anti-carbon campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his firstin 1989 about climate change...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
CountryUnited States of America
people community floating
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.
commitment justice generations
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.
time august shopping
The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?
christmas ties giving
We celebrate the birth of one who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other motorized tie racks.
zoos animal exotic
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.
business waste fossils
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free
real persistence anchors
TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.
digging-a-hole digging holes
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
powerful attitude thinking
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.
style desire ability
A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
writing may climate
The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
future two people
"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.
future long desire
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.
law yield divergent
The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.