We have to get our states to adopt what are called "renewable portfolio standards" pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.

The essential thing we need to understand is that the climate crisis is not some future threat, but a very present peril, the biggest one humans have ever encountered. Until we understand that, we'll dawdle.

Oil companies are radical because they're willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere.

On the top of these mile thick slabs of ice the water is percolating quickly to the base and greasing the skids, as it were, for the slide of that ice into the ocean.

I think it's going to be a tough century; I also think people are starting to rise up, and that a growth in human solidarity will help compensate for the loss of margin in the natural world that will make life harder.

Until it's understood to involve justice for those in poverty, a future for generations yet unborn, and a commitment to the rest of creation, it's unlikely we'll be able to overcome the status quo.

I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.