The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate.
Bill McKibbenTV is sometimes accused of encouraging fantasies. Its real problem, though, is that it encourages-enforces, almost-a brute realism. It is anti-Utopian in the extreme. We're discouraged from thinking that, except for a few new products, there might be a better way of doing things.
Bill McKibbenThe 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?
Bill McKibbenIf we had about 100 years, that sort of slow cultural conversion would be exactly the thing to do. But physics is calling the tune here. We've got to respond to a timetable that physics has set for us.
Bill McKibbenIf you look at the polling data, long before anyone had thought about Iraq, it was the [George W.] Bush Administration's decision in the first few weeks in its tenure in office to abnegate the Kyoto treaties that set our international perception into a nose-dive. People around the world looked on in amazement as the biggest part of the problem decided it wasn't going to make any effort to help with the solution.
Bill McKibbenIf you were running a solar company you may be okay - you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?
Bill McKibbenIn the United States, cheap fossil fuel has eroded communities. We're the first people with no real practical need for each other. Everything comes from a great distance through anonymous and invisible transactions. We've taken that to be a virtue, but it's as much a curse. Americans are not very satisfied with their lives, and the loss of community is part of that.
Bill McKibben