Bill McKibben Quotes About Community
-
I think communities of faith are extremely important in this question. I think that all faith communities share a common and unusual distinction in our time of being the only institutions left that can posit some goal other than accumulation for human existence. I think that's enormously important because it is that drive for consumption more than anything else that fuels the environmental devastation around us.
→ -
Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. If there is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.
→ -
In the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.
→ -
In certain ways, I think the work in the Evangelical community has been the most interesting and the most promising. Partly because Evangelical congregations may be harder to convince about issues but, on the other hand, are more likely to do something about it.
→ -
In the scientific community, the debate is over, for all intents and purposes, about whether or not the planet is heating and who is causing it. In fact, it's more or less been over since 1995.
→ -
I imagine a certain amount of consumer impulse will be replaced by community connection. You can already see it starting with things like the local food movement.
→ -
I do a certain amount of work in religious communities on these issues. It's not the central focus of my work but it is certainly an area where I have worked a lot. It has gotten much better over the years, especially over the last couple years. There wasn't a religious environmental movement 15 years ago, but there is now - in the Catholic community, the Jewish community, the mainline Protestant community, and in the Evangelical community.
→ -
All things considered, the internet seems fairly environmentally benign to me. The last stats I saw showed you could do 1,000 Google searches for the gas it took to drive six-tenths of a mile. But the internet can't substitute for real connection and community.
→ -
The technology we need most badly is the technology of community, the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done.
→
Related Authors
-
Robert Jensen Professor -
Richard Heinberg Journalist -
Clay Shirky Writer -
Howard Zinn Historian -
Tom Vanderbilt Journalist -
Amory Lovins Physicist -
Tim DeChristopher Activist -
Rachel Carson Marine biologist -
Jane Goodall Primatologist -
-
Andrew Revkin Fiction writer -
James Hansen Professor -
Paul Hawken Environmentalist -
Wendell Berry Novelist -
Chris Hedges Author -
Rainbow Rowell Author -
Alex Epstein American writer -
Al Gore Former Vice President of the United States -
Sue Halpern Writer -
Naomi Klein Author