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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

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Bill McKibben
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 8
Activist
Author
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Writer
Palo Alto
California
Imagine
Connection
Community
Impulse
Certain
Connections
Things
Starting
Consumer
Like
Amount
Replaced
Already
Locals
Movement
Local
Food
Consumers

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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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We use the web to help people organize in the flesh, and then we take the images of those events and put them back on the web to make them add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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That's when the vast consensus of the world's climatologists, brought together by the UN and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, really announced that this was going on, and since then the accumulation of data and wickedly hot years has served to only congeal that consensus much more firmly.
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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.
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The earth is a museum of divine intent.
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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.
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People in low-lying countries like Bangladesh with almost 140 million people who are managing to feed themselves, whose carbon emissions can't really be calculated (they are a rounding error in the UN's attempts to do national comparisons), and yet, most of whose people are at risk from increased flooding due to rising sea levels.
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I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.
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That's why people are standing up again to fight the Keystone pipeline in Nebraska and South Dakota and Montana. Everyone is well aware of what this industry is about. It engages not only in those kind of practices, polluting people's water, but it has polluted our political life now for a quarter century.
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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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The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we'll dawdle.
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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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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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Katrina opened a good door and Al Gore went through it with his movie.
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If we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.
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Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
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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.
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Here, there's more of a movement, it doesn't mean we're winning any more, but we're at least fighting.
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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.
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