Bill McKibben Quotes

You know, we humans are programmed to think that big changes on the Earth happened a long time ago, or will happen a long time in the future. What we don't realize is that they actually can happen right now. Right here, right now, while we're alive, in our own hours and days and months and years.

The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with intellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was here long before us and will be here long after us. The planet is running fine. What people are talking about is saving themselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving their cash flow.

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

Our planet's alarm is going off, and it is time to wake up and take action!

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

I think it's important to be kind to the world before it disappears if we don't take care of it.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us.

We all live on the same planet, it is our only home, so... we used to rotate crops back in the day and, you know, who cares if you're going to make a profit if everybody's too dead or glowing in the dark to be able to purchase anything.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.

There is no Plan B becasue there is no Planet B.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

We're being challenged to do something so profound, it's unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn't be more at stake. It's not even our species at stake; it's the whole dream of life on earth that's taken 4.5 billion years to realize - all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

I love the earth. If you ask me it's the greatest planet in the world.

The thing about global warming is that you can address it on a great number of levels - in fact you have to.

It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

The climate change movement is a river overflowing seeping into every nook and cranny.

Climate action is central for the future of our planet.