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41 " the mountain and the television weren't so much in different time zones as in different dimensions. "
― Bill McKibben , The Age of Missing Information
42 " For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight "
― Bill McKibben , Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
43 " One of the great privileges of living in the affluent parts of the modern world is that we've been able to forget that the natural world even exists...a great city seems to produce wealth out of thin air. This is illusion, of course, but powerful illusion. "
44 " ...a man with a phone more or less permanently affixed to his palm is partway a robot already "
― Bill McKibben
45 " Let's be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let's assume we're capable of acting together to do remarkable things. "
46 " The human game is a team sport. "
47 " The End of Nature was the first book for a general audience about global warming; it came out in 1989 and soon appeared in more than twenty languages. At the time, the available data on climate change still fit on the top of my desk. What’s astonishing is that twenty years later most of the predictions scientists were then making have proved too conservative. "
― Bill McKibben , The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change
48 " The single most inhospitable cubic meter of the Earth's surface - some waste of Saharan sand, some rocky Himalayan outcrop - is a thousand times more hospitable that the most appealing corner of Mars or Jupiter. "
49 " Few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go into the making of our climates and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale. In the following paper I hope to show that such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring at the present time. "
50 " I’ve sat behind a microphone and listened for decades as Americans learned to stop talking with each other and start shouting instead. No discussions, just ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist’ or ‘feminazi’ or ‘bigot’ or whatever. So here’s what I want to say, and I think it’s the one thing no one ever says any more in our public life: I think you’re wrong, but you may be right . "
― Bill McKibben , Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance
51 " Most of the time now we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of our consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half-truth at best— "
― Bill McKibben , Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks (Crown Journeys)
52 " We already have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as any scientist thinks is safe to burn. "
― Bill McKibben , Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist
53 " Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence. "
54 " Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is / organic wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man "
― Bill McKibben , The End of Nature
55 " when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “Of course they did,” or “All corporations lie,” or “Nothing will ever happen to them anyway.” This kind of knowing cynicism is no threat to the Exxons of the world—it’s a gift. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naïve outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the country were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense. "
56 " If you want honey you need a hive of bees. But if you were trying to decide if making honey was a good idea, bees would be the last creatures to ask. "
57 " In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing. "
58 " Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago. "
59 " the inexhaustible pages of nature … written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and color, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence. "
60 " A simple calculation shows that the temperature in the arctic regions would rise about eight to nine degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased to two and a half or three times its present value. "