Bill McKibben: Use

Bill McKibben is American environmentalist and writer. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Bill McKibben: 32   quotes 0   likes

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

Bill McKibben

Source: The Age of Missing Information

Loneliness

“Right now, plenty of people feel the peacefulness of their lives degraded by sprawl, or worry about the way consumerism has eroded the quality of our communities. For them, the idea of enough is not completely alien or distasteful, though it remains difficult to embrace. We've been told that it's impossible – that some force like evolution drives us on to More and Faster and Bigger. 'You can't stop progress.' But that's not true. We could choose to mature. That could be the new trick we share with each other, a trick as revolutionary as fire. Or even the computer.”

Bill McKibben

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 220

People , Peace , Way , Feeling

“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”

Bill McKibben

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 228

Secret , World , Mountain , Nature

“They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.”

Bill McKibben

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 198

People , Idea , Understanding , Decision

“Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say 'nature,' I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.”

Bill McKibben book The End of Nature

Source: The End of Nature (1989), p. 7

War , World , Confidence , Idea

“The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all… the most likely scenarios…are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean… Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down…”

Bill McKibben

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out Food-system collapse, sea-level rise, disease...Is it Too Late?, Rolling Stone by Bill McKibbon https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-mckibben-falter-climate-change-817310/, (9 April Other Bill McKibben Quotes, 2019)
2019

Time , Season , Thinking , Way