Climate Crisis Quotes

“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

“Whenever I looked upon a peaceful scene, it seemed to be part of my DNA to superimpose miserable images over what I saw. Hideous images became superimposed over a relaxed, happy landscape. Shards of glass, blood dotting my white sneakers and the cement floor, skin stinging as if I'd been sprayed with salt, cows stumbling and dying, a long mirror showing the backs of cancer patients, people burning up in flames, women wailing, acid rain, and my body scattering in all directions.”
― Kang Young-sook, At Night He Lifts Weights

“Let the future generations not laugh at us for our stupidity and lack of intelligence. We live to impress others. We lead a lifestyle to show others that we are higher up than them. We have devastated planet Earth's climate and ecosystem. We fight with each other for a false ego and pride.”
― Avijeet Das

“Want to do something impactful to help the climate? It's delicious, it's easy, and it starts with your fork.”
― Cathy Katin-Grazzini

“Eating for the planet can help cool the climate, and the time to act is now.”
― Cathy Katin-Grazzini, Love the Foods That Love the Planet: Recipes that Cool the Climate and Excite the Senses

“Jason turned on public radio and heard an interview with the Swedish author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline. He was talking quietly about the need for climate activists to consider going beyond pacifism and even considering targeted violence.

“No!” Jason yelled at his radio. “Don’t blow up a pipeline! Stay on the moral high ground!” It was baffling how people responded so differently to the climate crisis.

Some people wanted to blow up pipelines to stop the carbon economy at all costs. Others reacted with defensive disdain to any suggestion on how they could do their small part. They hoarded old lightbulbs and worried about people coming for their burgers and the gas grills they cooked them on. The world of their childhood was the last word. But nostalgia was not a strategy any more than violence.

What the planet needed was a plan.”
― Jeffrey D. Boldt, Big Lake Troubles

“The roaring of the seas; the turmoil of the sands; the howling of the winds; the fall of the hail; the burning sulphur. Woeful was the episode of the unexpected.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exchange

“Let us reflect upon the state of Earth Rishona and see clearly its distortion and imbalance — its out-of-shape and squished beauty. For its elegance has failed, its height has been pushed below its natural stature, and the image is unrecognisable.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exchange

“One ancient account claims it was vast enough to gnaw at the roots of the World Tree itself. If true, its size could be unimaginable.”
― Aaron Gilbee, How to Catch a Níð-höggr: Without Popping the World

“The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.”
― Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

“The richest 1 percent of the world's population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of humanity.”
― Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

“Achieving real, lasting change is much harder than firing weapons at a defined enemy,’ she said.”
― Fay Abernethy, First Contact, Second Chances

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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