McKibben, Bill

Bill McKibben is also the author of The Age of Missing Information. He was a staff writer for the New Yorker, and wrote articles for many other periodicals including Rolling Stone, The New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. He lives with his wife, Sue Halpern in the Adirondacks.

. . . the average American car driven the average American distance&emdash;ten thousand miles&emdash;in an Average American year releases its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere. The End of Nature, 1989.

 

. . . when it comes to carbon dioxide, a clean-burning engine is no better than the motor on a Model T. It will emit about 5.6 pounds of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline it consumes. Ibid.

 

The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse&emdash;the analogy is accurate. But it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden. Ibid.

 

As birds have flight, our special gift is reason. Ibid.

 

. . . our reason could also keep us from following blindly the biological imperative toward endless growth in numbers and territory. Our reason allows us to conceive of our species as a species, and to recognize the danger that our growth poses to it, and to feel something for the other species we threaten. Ibid.

 

The momentum behind our impulse to control nature may be too strong to stop. But the likelihood of defeat is not an excuse to avoid trying. Ibid.

 

The problem, of course, is learning to meet the world halfway. So far we show little ability to retreat even a little, to imagine any alternative to the apparently biological imperative to grow and expand. Hope, Human and Wild, 1995.

 

. . . settlers made wolves a symbol of the devil, placed bounties on their heads, organized state and federal predator-control programs, and farmed and developed their last few strongholds. Ibid.

 

A clearcut, which leaves an unshaded field, dehydrates the forest floor, reduces leaf litter, and increases soil temperature. Ibid.

 

By conservative estimate, a million animals are killed by cars on roads each day in the United States, many on small back roads. Ibid.

 

Nature as something separate from man has vanished. Ibid.

 

In Florida,where road mileage has increased 4.6 miles per day for the last fifty years, 65 percent of Florida panther deaths are roadkill; cars are even the main cause of mortality for the Florida scrub jay. Ibid.

 

I sense that anything truly new will come not from the universities or the legislative halls, but from the meeting between human and humus, between community and countryside. Ibid.

 

The farmer has traveled so far from the center of the region's life to a point so far on the periphery that even at the state fair most people can no longer begin to comprehend that life. Ibid.

 

You have to listen harder to the natural world so you can separate out the primal song from the songs of our
civilization and from our static. The Age of Missing
information, 1992.

The upshot of a nature education by television is a deep fondness for certain species and a deep lack of
understanding of systems, or of the policies that destroy
those systems. Ibid.

The forest product companiesdo plant trees. They plant them in nice straight rows, every sapling the same age
and the same height and the same species, and then they drop herbicides from helicopters to keep down undesirable
varieties; they create, in other words, sterile plantations for growing timber and pulp. Ibid.

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. Ibid.

It rarely occurs to us how much intelligence about
the world a light erases. Ibid.

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. Ibid.