Bill McKibben

“When you are in a hole, stop digging!”

“Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.”

“I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.”

“...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.”

“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.”

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”

“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.”

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

“Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.”

“It's a quiet revolution begun by ordinary people with the stuff of our daily lives.”

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

“increasingly we live in a world filled with the equivalents of deadly garage-door openers, unnecessary items that offer us mild and insipid comfort at the price of a dangerous and uncomfortable planet, and at the price of any real relationship to the physical world. if you live in a suburban home and commute to a parking garage somewhere, that ten seconds of opening the garage door(manually) might be nearly the only rain you ever feel.”

“TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.”

“we use TV as we use tranquilizers- to even things out, to blot out unpleasantness, to dilute confusion, distress, unhappiness, loneliness.”

“we have developed a series of emotional thermostats as well, by far the most potent of which is television itself. instead of really experiencing the highs and lows, pains and joys, that make up a life, many of us use TV just as we use central heating- to flatten our variations, to maintain a constant "optimal" temperature.”

“the mountain and the television weren't so much in different time zones as in different dimensions.”

“what sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything.”

“if there is any one subject on which everyone seems to agree, any one point of doctrine to which every political sect subscribes, it's that "economic growth" is the highest goal, our ultimate goal as a country. and not only as a country-as states, as communities, as corporations, as individuals.”

“everyone knows, at some level, that the sharp line between "good weather" and "bad weather" is a fiction, that we need rain as surely as we need sun.”

“electronic media have become an environment of their own- to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live. and the problem is not that it exists- the problem is that it supplants. it's simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom.”

“money supplants skill; it's possession allows us to become happily stupid.”

“the television culture celebrates incompetence.”

“what you do every day is what forms your mind and precious few of us can or would spend most days outdoors.”

“TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.”

“TV was like a third parent- a source of ideas and information and impressions. and not such a bad parent- always with time to spare, always eager to please, often funny.”