Bill McKibben Quotes

Global climate change is real and we have a limited time to change our behavior or live with the consequences. We can all help by making small changes in our lives to letting our voice be heard by our governing bodies. As has always been the case in this country, if the people demand change, it will come.

We the people have the strength to bring our country from our weak-kneed stumbling gait in the last ranks of reason to the leadership of the great march to environmental victory.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

Most of my work for the past 25 years has been devoted to organizing demonstrations, benefits and campaigns, many of which have had the effect of bringing a policy debate to public focus or moving a political agenda forward. It's become a cliché to say 'think globally and act locally,' but it works.

I think we're at a time where people just want to join together and cause change. People don't want to live like this any more.

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My partner in much of this work [climate movement], who really came up with the divestment campaign with me, Naomi Klein, I think has written powerfully about this.

My view on global warming is that it's a gigantic financial scam to funnel money to these countries that think they ostensibly are going to use to improve conditions in their country, environmentally and so on, but officials use - I guess apparently Tiger Woods did - to hire hookers, ride around in limos and in cases of some of these diplomats and some of these countries buy cocaine.

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.

The ways of change are dictated by the circumstances of each country, each place and each time. I don't think that arrogant intellectuals should be dictating to the people which way they should be heading. I think we should be listening to the people, see in which directions things are developing. People are walking where they can, not where they want to. But they are walking!

And to me, that's why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it's great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again.

Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.

One should be cautious about "general conceptions." I think a strong case can be made that activism today is as high as ever, perhaps more so, and is also taking new and significant forms. There has never been anything like the international solidarity movements that began to take shape in the 1980s, right in the mainstream, or the global justice movements that have become a very powerful force in later years. It's true that the society is highly atomized, which does induce a sense of hopelessness often - quite mistakenly I think.

People are fed up - and I think quite rightfully so. But what are they proposing as an alternative to just being upset or feeling disillusioned or abandoned? That kind of protest movement really needs to happen on a much bigger scale, but there needs to be a clearer message.

I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.

Every night on the stop global warming college tour, Laurie and I would tell these great young people that they have the power to do anything they want. That we all have the power to create a movement for change. That the best part of ourselves is the part that rises up instinctively from compassion.

With the passion and the vision of the Berners [Sanders] coming into the Greens - we call it berning green - and the events that I'm going to that are being created around the country right now, it's the Bernie folks who are showing up in huge numbers along with the traditional Green. It's very powerful.

I think the environmental movement is now so large and diverse that it's hard to talk of it as a single entity.

When millions of people stand up and fight...they win.

I think we all have a tendency to feel like, "Well, what can I do? I can't influence the government or politics in my country."

Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

People of conscience in our leadership in Washington have been scared off by the right and the fossil fuel lobbies. They won't even use the term "sustainability" or "climate change" in an energy bill, which is ludicrous on its face. It completely ignores the elephant in the room that we're all dealing with. The average American doesn't even believe climate change is real, they think it's all a hoax.

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating ? - those are the things that determine what happens.

Our agitation, you know, helps keep yours alive in the rank and file.