Quote

I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.

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
Also
Profoundly
Self
Processes
Going
Engaged
Think
Basic
Destructiveness
Thinking
Physical
Disruption
Creation
Blasphemy
Process
Thorough
Felt
Suicidal

More quotes by Bill McKibben

Image
I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise.
Bill McKibben
Image
Solar power seems to be truly bipartisan in its appeal.
Bill McKibben
Image
What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.
Bill McKibben
Image
Ice in the West Antarctic and over Greenland, i.e., ice that's over a rock at the moment, that will raise the level of the sea as it slides into the ocean, putting at risk everyone and everything that lives on the coasts, and that includes an enormous percentage of the world's people.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
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're mathematically past the point where the accumulation of individual actions can add up quickly enough to make a difference. The individual action that actually matters is not being an individual. It's joining together with other people in groups large enough to change the political dynamic around climate change.
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
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
Image
One degree turns out to be enough to really unhinge all sorts of earth's ecosystems.
Bill McKibben
Image
Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Bill McKibben
Image
We have to get our states to adopt what are called renewable portfolio standards pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.
Bill McKibben
Image
We've been in lots of places that I suppose, by Oxford standards, would be considered illiterate, but everyone's completely conversant with the idea that here is a number, and that number is above it, and that's too high. It's not a very complicated idea.
Bill McKibben
Image
The idea that China and India will just abandon climate action is not true, because they're doing it for more reasons than we are.
Bill McKibben
Image
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
Image
We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.
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
If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.
Bill McKibben
Image
We have assumed control where once we worked with what we were given.
Bill McKibben
Image
what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.
Bill McKibben