Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben
William Ernest "Bill" McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the anti-carbon campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his firstin 1989 about climate change...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEnvironmentalist
CountryUnited States of America
home levels spare-time
Spend 70% of your spare time doing things close to home and the other 30% doing work at the global and national level.
college guarantees use
If [a student's] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.
country talking ice
All the things that we've done as a species have had a limited scope. We're talking about melting the ice caps, raising the level of the seas dramatically, changing the distribution of every other species on Earth, perhaps wiping out one-third or half of them. The changes at work are geologic in scale. The level of change required to deal with it is enormous, too. It will require change in every country. It will require a degree of global cooperation that we haven't seen before.
oil average seductive
Fossil fuel is very seductive stuff. [John Maynard] Keynes once said that, as far as he could tell, the average standard of living from the beginning of human history to the middle of the eighteenth century had perhaps doubled. Not much had changed, and then we found coal and gas and oil and everything changed. We're reaping the result of that, both ecologically and socially.
half tvs easy
TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.
air years long
I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.
tolerance laziness moral
But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
healthy balance fuel
You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet
country hard-work thinking
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it's going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem.
running advent advent-christmas
Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when you're running yourself.
country giving-up talking
When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.
museums earth divine
The earth is a museum of divine intent.
digging-a-hole digging holes
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
warning wake-up climate-change
We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.