Top 90 Bill McKibben Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.”

— Bill McKibben

52. “In 50 years, no one will care about the fiscal cliff or the Euro crisis. They’ll just ask, “So the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?””

— Bill McKibben

53. “At the moment, the 4 percent of us in this country produce a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide – once you look at maps of rising sea levels and spreading mosquitoes, you realize that we’ve probably never figured out a way to hate our neighbors around the world much more effectively.”

— Bill McKibben

54. “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

55. “Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.”

— Bill McKibben

56. “I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”

— Bill McKibben

57. “A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning.”

— Bill McKibben

58. “There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.”

— Bill McKibben

59. “Until it’s understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to overcome the status quo.”

— Bill McKibben

60. “In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough.”

— Bill McKibben

61. “A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.”

— Bill McKibben

62. “Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.”

— Bill McKibben

63. “The human game is a team sport.”

— Bill McKibben

64. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

65. “In fact, there are half as many wild animals on the planet as there were in 1970, an awesome and mostly unnoticed silencing.”

— Bill McKibben

66. “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

67. “It ensured that I’d never think that patriotism and dissent were opposites.”

— Bill McKibben

68. “My goal was to have as many of the primary sources as I could made available for people to look at and understand. Climate change is probably the most important thing that’s ever happened, and yet people’s understanding of it and its history remains a little fuzzy.”

— Bill McKibben

69. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

70. “Vermont breweries are symbols of everything that’s right and good about a free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors – and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

— Bill McKibben

71. “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

72. “Don’t be so sure that your version of reality is better because it’s newer.”

— Bill McKibben

73. “A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.”

— Bill McKibben

74. “Last year, the USDA said for the first time in 150 years that there were more farms in America instead of fewer. I think that’s the single most hopeful statistic I know.”

— Bill McKibben

75. “What makes us different? We’re the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.”

— Bill McKibben

76. “When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.”

— Bill McKibben

77. “But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn’t ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway.”

— Bill McKibben

78. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

79. “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

80. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

81. “We have, in other words, changed the energy balance of our planet, the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space. Those of us who burn lots of fossil fuel have changed the way the world operates, fundamentally.”

— Bill McKibben

82. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

83. “For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight.”

— Bill McKibben

84. “So: global warming is the ultimate problem of oil companies because oil causes it, and it’s the ultimate problem for government haters because without government intervention, you can’t solve it. Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change.”

— Bill McKibben

85. “A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope – the only obligation is honesty...”

— Bill McKibben

86. “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.”

— Bill McKibben

87. “And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century.”

— Bill McKibben

88. “I am not describing what will happen if we don’t take action, or warning of some future threat. This is the current inventory: more thunder, more lightning, less ice.”

— Bill McKibben

89. “A single farmers’ market, for instance, may not seem very important compared to a Wal-Mart, but farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of our food economy.”

— Bill McKibben

90. “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.”

— Bill McKibben