Quote of the Day (Bill McKibben, on Climate Change, ‘The Fight of Our Time’)

“If we do not solve this problem soon, we will not solve it. We are called upon to act with all that we have. It is the fight of our time — and we need you.”—Environmental author-activist Bill McKibben, on climate change, quoted in Jamie Landers, “Bill McKibben Calls for Individual Action and Collective Climate Change Reversal,” The  Chautauquan Daily, Aug. 15, 2019

At the moment, many would say that the coronavirus pandemic is “the fight of our time”—and I’m not sure I would quarrel with that assessment.

But I strongly believe that climate change has this in common with COVID-19: It is an emergency waiting to happen, a perfect storm resulting from authoritarian instincts that smother inconvenient bad news, our country’s unwillingness to make prudent investments that might stave off disaster, and—I might as well say it—a President who scoffs at science and even elementary facts while turning a real but by means insoluble problem into a massive catastrophe that didn’t have to happen. And it has similar potential to create a Darwinian struggle in which the haves are far, far more likely to survive than the have-nots.

Take a look around at all the people wearing masks today. In the not-so-distant future, given that President’s attitude toward the environment—and his diehard followers’ swallowing of nearly every word he says—it is not at all inconceivable that those masks may come into use again, even after this particular pandemic subsides, if our air becomes too polluted to breathe.

Quote of the Day (Bill McKibben, on Threats Made Over Social Media)

"Threatening to kill or rape someone shouldn’t be banal. It should shock everyone who comes across such a threat. And that should go without saying, except that increasingly it doesn’t, not in a world where the president has said that he longed for the days when disruptive protesters were carried away from the scene ‘on a stretcher.’ It’s perversely heartening to see that the apparent murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi seems to have temporarily interrupted business as usual. Such shock and outrage is crucial, because in a world where dissenters are dismembered, there’s no hope for change. The prospect that you’ll be killed for what you say makes discussion essentially impossible. A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change.”—Environmental activist Bill McKibben, after online posting of his home address with death threats made against him, in “Let’s Agree Not to Kill One Another,” The New York Times, Oct. 21, 2018

Quote of the Day (Bill McKibben, on Faithfulness in His Generation)

“My generation has been good at many things, but tenacity—faithfulness—is not one of them. Sometimes, in fact, we simply want too much. Like marriages that complete us, fulfill us in every way, make us whole, instead of marriages where, on most days, it's enough to be living faithfully together, adding another increment of quotidian devotion, giving each other the benefit of the doubt. Or like religious experiences, instead of the experience of being religious. I have no real sense of what it might have felt like to inhabit the medieval world, when the church was simply the air one breathed, the environment in which one lived.”— Bill McKibben, “High Fidelity,” The Christian Century, March 23, 2004, anthologized in The Best Christian Writing 2006, edited by John Wilson (2005)