Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Good
Line
Level
Fiction
Levels
Sharp
Lines
Surely
Everyone
Weather
Need
Rain
Needs
Sun

More quotes by Bill McKibben

Image
We'll never get there if we let the climate crisis bloom unchecked, so for the moment the key is to organize, organize, organize!
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.
Bill McKibben
Image
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
Bill McKibben
Image
We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.
Bill McKibben
Image
It's our own throat that we are cutting in the end along with everyone else's. We need to be exercising precisely the kind of leadership that might allow us to nudge China and India, say, onto different energy trajectories, in order to improve our own chances of surviving this century.
Bill McKibben
Image
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
Bill McKibben
Image
In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The fight around climate change, which I've spent my life on, is somewhat more difficult than gay marriages because no one makes trillions of dollars a year being a bigot, and that's how much the fossil-fuel industry pulls in pumping carbon into the air. But the principle is the same, I think.
Bill McKibben
Image
I'm far less a leader than a writer.
Bill McKibben
Image
In the States we've had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.
Bill McKibben
Image
we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
Bill McKibben
Image
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.
Bill McKibben
Image
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.
Bill McKibben
Image
One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
Bill McKibben