I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.

On my reading of history people who want to bring us the best are usually the people we ought to be afraid of.

The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.

Much of the point of individual action is really to communicate with other people and with political leaders and to demonstrate to them that we are willing to live lives which are less dependent on fossil fuels and we'll show you that now by changing our individual life to some extent but we want you to take action, political leaders, so that we aren't living in a society in which we're dependent on poisoning the future in order to maintain present lifestyles.

Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.

If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.

I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer.