We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.

Sometimes, I, anyway, get tired of playing defence, and like to play offence.

We'd won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren't going to win.

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.

[The Maldives] they've become deeply politically engaged - just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

I just keep trying to explain what's going on with our planet - and now, to explain what's going on with our politics, which explains why we're not doing anything about the former.

I don't think the fossil fuel industry will listen, not until we build up a lot of pressure. I do think we can persuade some shareholders that they don't want to be involved in this enterprise.