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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

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Bill McKibben
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Doe
Woods
Photos
Killing
Parking
Lifetime
Splendor
Animals
Contain
Expect
Arrive
Attractively
Animal
Magazine
Snarl
Shows
Surprised
Mating
Nature
Magazines
Conditioned

More quotes by Bill McKibben

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Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
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There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don't have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.
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In my own faith tradition, these questions have been very important. It has always been easiest for me to apprehend God in the natural world. I love to go to church, but when I really want to feel the presence of the divine I'm more likely to head up into the mountains.
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Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.
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My guess is that liberating the fossil fuel industry to frack anywhere they want will drive down the rate at which we're converting to sun and wind. And it's entirely a rate problem at this point.
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The earth is a museum of divine intent.
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The ability to write compelling emails may be the single most useful talent an organizer can possess.
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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.
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I did very much like [Barack] Obama's attack on fossil fuel subsidies for fossil fuel companies. We asked for that in demonstrations and petitions, and now we'll try to push it forward.
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I guess the underlying principle might be, don't make it too easy for them to stereotype you.
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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
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Environmentalism, I'd always been told, was just rich white people.
Bill McKibben
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There's no huge mystery. If you dig up huge amounts of carbon, huge amounts of ancient biology, hundreds of millions of year's worth of ancient biology, and flush it into the atmosphere in a matter of decades, then it stands to reason that we're going to have enormous effects, and now we can see those effects all around us.
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I think [George W.] Bush has done nothing right about global warming.
Bill McKibben
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If you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
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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
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I don't spend a huge amount of time fixated on climate denial because I don't think that their objections, though sometimes couched in science, are based in science. I think they're based in ideology. And I don't think there's anything you can do.
Bill McKibben
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One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
Bill McKibben
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we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.
Bill McKibben
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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