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If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!

Bill McKibben

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Ability Desire Style
I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Running Stress Thinking
But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Laziness Moral Tolerance
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
Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Needs Powerful Real
A spiritual voice is urgently needed to underline the fact that global warming is already causing human anguish and mortality in our nation and abroad, and much more will occur in the future without rapid action.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Facts Spiritual Voice
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Chemistry Hands Real
We’ll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Attitude Powerful Thinking
If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Profit Wreckage Wrecks
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Climate Essentials Needs
Those of us in the west have figured out a lot of ways to damage the lives of poor people in this country and around the world over the years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Country People Years
Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Couple Ice Years
We had other currencies that we could find work in – the currencies of movements: passion, spirit, creativity.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Creativity Movement Passion
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Challenges Important Tendencies
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
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.
BILL MCKIBBEN

Corporations Littles Our Society

If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!

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If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it’s going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it’s also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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