Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.

By themselves, they are not enough; we also need to engage in political action.

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

In the States, the movement's actually gotten much much much stronger. There really was no climate movement so to speak before that - I think because everybody assumed that reasonable heads would prevail and do the right thing - and why would you need to have a huge movement in order to cause our leaders to deal with the most serious problem that they face. In a rational world you wouldn't. They would deal with it.

The seasons don't matter to most of us anymore except as spectacles. In my county and in many places around this part of the nation, the fair that once marked the harvest now takes place in late August, while tourist dollars are still in heavy circulation. Why celebrate the harvest when you harvest every week with a shopping cart?

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place.

When we work all over the planet, it's mostly poor and black and brown and young people, because that's mostly what the world [environmentalism] is.