Climate Crisis Quotes

“A home’s value should come from its ability to provide shelter and community, not from its financial returns.”
― Fons Burger, The Only Possible Solution: How to Shape the Future for Our Next Generations

“Water is a source of life but also a source of conflict, greed, and war.”
― Fons Burger, The Only Possible Solution: How to Shape the Future for Our Next Generations

“Instead, the world should run on sufficiency; enough food, enough energy, enough connection, shared fairly, within the boundaries of ecosystems.”
― Fons Burger, The Only Possible Solution: How to Shape the Future for Our Next Generations

“You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.”
― Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

“Here at the end of the world, with the climate crisis bearing down like Godzilla over downtown Tokyo, U.S. taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas drilling are now almost literally insane.”
― Rachel Maddow

“Future generations will look back at the time we are living in now. The kind of future they look from, and the story they tell about our period, will be shaped by choices we make in our lifetimes. The most telling choice of all may well be the story we live from and see ourselves participating in. It sets the context of our lives in a way that influences all our other decisions.

In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now. When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive. A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses. The Great Turning is such a story.”
― Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold

“That was when I still had a mother who taught me to read and write; who handled books with care, saying they were marvels contained in paper, calling them our friends; a mother who celebrated life through small acts, every day; whose luminous presence found beauty in the world that was degrading minute by minute.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, The Unworthy

“Learning a language promoted the first tender shoots of intercultural understanding. People became familiar with previously alien concepts and, as a consequence, more open to them.”
― Fay Abernethy, First Contact, Second Chances

“Ditch the car, ride a bike.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“And along the edges of the Elbe, the drought stones appear: river boulders that are exposed when water levels are desperately low. They carry carved dates and inscriptions from earlier drought years: 1417, 1473, 1616,
1830. Near Děčín, close to the Czech–German border, a stone emerges that bears a warning: Wenn du mich siest, danne weine. If you see me, weep.”
― Robert Macfarlane (Author)

“Has the water died?’ asks Will. He is only nine. It is painful for him to see this. He understands that there is something very wrong here, though he cannot name it. Something in the old power of this place, and its new injury, troubles him deeply.
‘No, of course not,’ I say, but my certainty is a deceit. As we leave the wood we see an egret, white as a slice of snow, standing stone-still in the exhausted outflow channel, as if its patience might somehow summon back the water’s life.”
― Robert Macfarlane

“Hopefulness is risky, since it is after all a form of trust, trust in the unknown and the possible, even in discontinuity. To be hopeful is to take on a different persona, one that risks disappointment, betrayal, and there have been major disappointments in recent years. Other times that tale of gloom seems to come from the belief in a univocal narrative, in the idea that everything is heading in one direction, and since it's clearly not all good, it must be bad.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“Ord ultimately concludes that human civilization has a good chance to survive even at double that temperature rise. "I looked at these models up to about 20 degrees of warming, and it still seems like there would be substantial habitable areas," he said. "But, it's something where it'd be very bad, just to be clear to the audience," Ord hastened to add.
     Climate science suggests that "very bad" is a gross understatement. "A temperature rise of 10 degrees [Celsius] would be a mass extinction event in the long term," says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and an expert on climate-induced civilizational collapse.”
― Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

“In 1997, climate change was discussed in the future tense. Today we discuss it in the present tense. It is no longer something that may happen. It is happening now.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“We have put the extinction clock on a fast-forward.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“In the new world we are entering, protecting the diversity of life on earth is no longer simply a matter of setting aside tracts of land, fencing them off, and calling them parks and preserves. Success in this effort depends also on stabilizing both climate and population.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“Earth doesn't need our consent to wipe us out, any more than we asked permission from corona virus. Cosmos carries no fury like a mother done wrong - Mother brings us into the world, mother can take us out.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“... humans are simply zombie hosts obediently disseminating their seeds, tubers, sparks, and gasses around the globe. In the end, the geologic record will show that it is we who served fire, who enabled it to burn more broadly and brightly than it ever has before. Fire, thus far, has mastered us. [Fire Weather; p. 303]”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

“Did God regret creating man? I am sure he did. See what man is doing to the planet.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“The planet is sending warnings in form of storms, heat and extreme weather events. Our choice is to act or to be acted upon.”
― Victor Manan Nyambala

“The Great Activist (Sonnet)

The world doesn't need another climate summit,
the world needs a climate summon,
and not from some fair-weather activist
that jumps from one trend to another,
like privileged white women hop from
pseudoscience to pseudoscience -

the world needs a climate summon
from the commoners of the world,
everyday ordinary people with
a mundane job and a mundane life -

when these people sense the immediate
emergency that the planet faces,
then no amount of performative policy
will be required anymore,

because there is no greater environmental
stabilizer than commoners jolted to duty -
the greatest activist is the conscientious commoner.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The world doesn't need another climate summit, the world needs a climate summon.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The world doesn't need another climate summit, the world needs a climate summon, and not from some fair-weather activist that jumps from one trend to another, like privileged white women hop from pseudoscience to pseudoscience - the world needs a climate summon from the commoners of the world, everyday ordinary people with a mundane job and a mundane life - when these people sense the immediate emergency that the planet faces, then no amount of performative policy will be required anymore, because there is no greater environmental stabilizer than commoners jolted to duty.”
― Abhijit Naskar, With Love From A Blue Rock

“The Lacandones have a prophecy that the world will be destroyed when the last mahogany tree is gone. The mahogany is the 'indicator species' for the rain forest; its health or death is indicative of the health or death of the entire ecosystem. The smoke from the burning of tropical rain forests can already be seen from satellites miles above Earth.

The indigenous people of the true, original First World are preparing themselves for the final struggle. Many have nothing left to lose, only the remaining trees and land, and their children, to fight for. As the Zapatistas declared: 'We are the dead, rising to die again so our people can live once more.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“The reckless application of technology, harnessed to greed, degrades and destroys the ecosystems in which the energies of the elements are maintained in exquisite balance. Since the elements constitute us, we are also being degraded in the process. We are engaged in an ongoing assault on the planetary elements, the decimation of species, and the relentless suicidal degradation of our own habitats. In short, the situation can be called ecocide. Humankind is at war with nature.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“The stories we hear daily tell us that we are not good enough to rise to our environmental moment. For a long time, our cultural myths told us that we were superior to nature to justify our domination of land and animals. Now; we hear that we kill our planet through our every action, and that this Earth would be better off without people. Human beings, our cultural myths tell us, are self interested above all else. And even if we want to protect the ecology of this planet, we waited until it was too late. In all these stories, we hear that humans are not a part of nature; we are apart from her. Naomi Klein writes that blaming the climate crisis on "human nature" and our supposed inherent greed allows us to ignore that the crisis is caused by harmful, powerful systems like capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and also allows us to justify the need for sacrifice zones and sacrificial people in a fossil-fueled system. Throwing up our hands and saying environmental crises are humanity's inevitable outcome also "erase the very existence of human systems that organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment the cycles of regeneration.”
― Alice Irene Whittaker, Homing: A Quest to Care for Myself and the Earth

“Whatever we make, or invent, or build, is with us forever; we cannot throw it away. The methan and carbon diocide we put into the atmosphere will have effects, just like the nitrogen and phospate we flush into our rivers. They will end up impacting on human and more-than-human bodies, and lives. So the first question is 'should we be doing this?' That must replace the standard 20th-century question: 'can we make a profit from doing this?”
― Natalie Bennett, Green Thinking

“Anybody who has ever planted an apple tree knows that you cannot extract resources indefinitely. An apple tree only grows a certain number of apples every year. You can maximize your harvest by treating the plant better and giving it more fertilizer, but it will never become an infinite apple tree. Most other natural resources work the same way and, at the moment, we are running out of all of them.”
― Tom Suberg, The System is Working Perfectly: Just Not For You

“Puoluemuodon intohimoinen sanansaattaja Andreas Malm on etsinyt ilmastoliikkeille oppitunteja neuvostoliittolaisen bolševismin historiasta. Malm näkee tilanteessamme yhtäläisyyksiä ensimmäisen maailmansodan loppupuolen tsaari-Venäjään, joka kärsi joukosta lomittaisia kriisejä. Malm samastaa ilmastonmuutoksen vaatimat toimet bolševikkijohtaja Vladimir Leninin huudattamaan vallankumoukseen, josta tämä kirjoittaa vuonna 1917 julkaistussa tekstissään ”Uhkaava katastrofi ja kuinka sitä vastaan on taisteltava”.³⁷² Kirjoituksessaan Lenin varoittaa Venäjää uhkaavasta nälänhädästä. Sotatoimet olivat epävakauttaneet koko valtion, johtaneet miljoonien kuolemiin, tuhonneet maan rautatieinfrastruktuurin ja pysäyttäneet teollisuuden. Jos jotain ei tapahtuisi pian, yltyisi katastrofi entisestään. Muiden aikansa sosialistien tapaan Lenin näki valtioiden valtavat sota-ajan edesottamukset ja kysyi, miksei niitä voitaisi käyttää myös rauhanaikana. Eikö valtavaa resurssien ja talouden tarkoituksenmukaista liikekannallepanoa voisi hyödyntää myös nälänhädän torjumiseen, ei vain toisten maiden työläisten tappamiseen? Valtion rakentamat koneistot oli nyt valjastettava katastrofien torjumiseen niiden tuottamisen sijaan.

Tässä Malm näkee yhtäläisyyden bolševikkien ja oman tilanteemme välillä. Eikö meidänkin ensisijainen tavoitteemme ole kapitalistisen helvetinkoneen kääntäminen pois elämän ennakkoehtojen tuhoamisesta kohti rakentavia tavoitteita? Jos näin on, pitää Malm myös Leninin johtopäätöstä sopivasta toiminnan mallista selvänä: horisontaaliset ja spontaanit kokeilut on hylättävä. Niiden sijaan on omaksuttava kurinalainen järjestysmuoto, joka kykenee ottamaan valtion haltuun ja kukistamaan ympäristöliikkeen viholliset.

Malm kuitenkin huomauttaa, ettei tähän kykeneviä organisaatioita enää varsinaisesti ole. 1900-luvun massapuolueet, joiden kannatus ulottui satamatyöläisistä armeijaan ja valtion virastoihin, ovat kadonneet historian tuuliin.³⁷⁴ Käytännössä Malm päätyy siis tukemaan toiminnan muotoa, jonka väkivaltaiset tulokset tunnemme ja jonka historialliset ennakkoehdot eivät välttämättä tällä hetkellä täyty. Pakko on Malmin mukaan kuitenkin tilanteemme sanelema: eko-leninismi tai katastrofi. Valitkaa te.

Malmin esittämä kahtiajako on toisin sanottuna epärehellinen. Ensinnäkin historiallisessa tehtävässään epäonnistunut, autoritääriseksi väkivaltakoneistoksi typistynyt reaalisosialismi asetetaan katastrofin kanssa vastakkain, vaikka se saattaisi yhtä hyvin edustaa uudenlaista katastrofia. Tämän lisäksi sen saavuttamisen ennakkoehdot ovat jopa Malmin itsensä mukaan ulottumattomissa. Malmin meille esittämä valinta on siis mahdottoman puoluebyrokraattisen tyrannian ja vääjäämättömän ekokatastrofin välillä. Vähemmästäkin saattaa vaipua epätoivoon.”
― Jooseppi Räikkönen, Palavan maailman politiikka