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?

We couldn't outspend the fossil fuel industry - they have more money than God.

The real tight interface is between the book and the reader-the world of the book is plugged right into your brain, never mind the [virtual reality] bodysuit.

There is no real scientific debate over what is happening; of course there is debate over exactly how it is going to play out in the decades ahead, because this is a large experiment that we haven't done before, and no one knows precisely how one can ever precisely predict what effects this heat will have. But all the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.

We are altering the most basic forces of the planet's surface - the content of the sunlight, the temperature and aridity - and that brings out the most powerful questions about who is in charge. If you wanted to give a name to this theological problem, I think you could say that we are engaged in decreation.

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.

We can no longer imagine that we are part of something larger than ourselves - that is what all this boils down to.