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Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

Bill McKibben

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

Ice Ocean Rocks
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Business Fuel Waste
In reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing thats going on every single day.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Reality
“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Future People Two
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

Self Suicidal Thinking
Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Abundance Problem Use
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

Animal Lifetime Magazine
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

Climate Action Ideas India
Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Kids Looks Perfect
There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Energy Impossible
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
BILL MCKIBBEN

Change Climate Digging Hole
Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Colonialism Kind Slavery
On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Ice Ocean Water
[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Coral Dying President Reefs
We have built a greenhouse, a human greenhouse, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Biodiversity Garden Sweet
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Challenges Important Tendencies

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

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Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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