climate emergency
If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees. If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the earth’s CO2 blanket, the earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation, this is high school science.
The Great Disruption (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 2.
In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define out individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 6.
Oil companies and other interested parties occasionally try to start a debate by making claims that are clearly and criminally fallacious, on the grounds that we might believe there’s an element of doubt, or that the truth lies somewhere in between, but really there’s nothing to argue about. Climate change is happening now, and it will be devastating, unless unimaginably enormous steps are taken by everyone, immediately.
“October 2006,” in Shakespeare Wrote for Money (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2008), 33.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
University of Portland commencement speech, May 3, 2009.
This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.
University of Portland commencement speech, May 3, 2009.
The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.
A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 122.
Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000.
Thomas L. Friedman’s quotes Watson in “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” The New York Times, July 24, 2010.