The movers and shakers on our planet, aren't the billionaires and generals, they are the incredible numbers of people around the world filled with love for neighbor and for the earth who are resisting, remaking, restoring, renewing and revitalising.

Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.

What makes us different? We're the creature that can decide not to do something that we are capable of doing.

We spend probably more of our time than we should, just because it's close to home, worrying about the West. But it's equally important to figure out how we're going to free up the resources to let the developing world leapfrog the fossil fuel age. That's at least as mathematically important, and at least as morally crucial.

Permafrost in the soil [is melting], in the boreal and arctic areas in the world, and, probably even more alarming in the last six or eight months, the data on what is happening to the ice shelves in Greenland and the west Antarctic has begun to cause people to radically reassess the earlier conviction that those ice shelves were stable on a kind of century-long time scale.

There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions.

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us....God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions.