We Are the Weather Quotes

“Sadness and joy aren't opposites of each other. They are each the opposite of indifference.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“You’re entirely capable of doing things you aren’t moved to do and refraining from things that you want to do. That doesn’t make you Gandhi. It makes you an adult.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Choosing to eat fewer animal products is probably the most important action an individual can take to reverse global warming—it has a known and significant effect on the environment, and, done collectively, would push the culture and the marketplace with more force than any march.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Changing how we eat will not be enough, on its own, to save the planet, but we cannot save the planet without changing how we eat.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“We can choose to make changes, or we can be subject to other changes--mass migration, disease, armed conflict, a greatly diminished quality of life--but there is no future without change. The luxury of choosing which changes we prefer has an expiration date.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think - while you think, while we think - our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Yes, there are constraints on our actions, conventions and structural injustices that set the parameters of possibility. Our free will is not omnipotent – we can't do whatever we want. But, as Scranton says, we are free to choose from possible options. And one of our options is to make environmentally conscientious choices. It doesn't require breaking the laws of physics–or even electing a green president–to select something plant-based from a menu or at the grocery store. And although it may be a neoliberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all. Both macro and micro actions have power, and when it comes to mitigating our planetary destruction, it is unethical to dismiss either, or to proclaim that because the large cannot be achieved, the small should not be attempted.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“The important measurement is not the distance from unattainable perfection, but from unforgivable inaction.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“And you can't force someone to believe, not even with better and louder and more virtuous arguments, not even with irrefutable evidence”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“If we don't demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Human populations have driven other human populations to the brink of extinction numerous times throughout history. Now the entire species threatens itself with mass suicide. Not because anyone is forcing us to. Not because we don't know better. And not because we don't have alternatives.

We are killing ourselves because choosing death is more convenient than choosing life. Because the people committing suicide are not the first to die from it. Because we believe that someday, somewhere, some genius is bound to invent a miracle technology that will change our world so that we don't have to change our lives. Because short-term pleasure is more seductive than long-term survival. Because no one wants to exercise their capacity for intentional behavior until someone else does. Until the neighborhood does. Until the energy and car companies do. Until the federal government does. Until China, Australia, India, Brazil, the U.K. - until the whole world does. Because we are oblivious to the death that we pass every day. "We have to do something" we tell one another, as though reciting the line were enough. "We have to do something" we tell ourselves, and then wait for instructions that are not on the way. We know that we are choosing our own end; we just can't believe it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Encoded into our language is the understanding that disasters tend to expose that which was previously hidden. As the planetary crisis unfolds as a series of emergencies, our decisions will reveal who we are.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are the traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don't take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them...”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Different studies suggest different dietary changes in response to climate change, but the ballpark is pretty clear. The most comprehensive assessment of the livestock industry’s environmental impact was published in Nature in October 2018. After analyzing food-production systems from every country around the world, the authors concluded that while undernourished people living in poverty across the globe could actually eat a little more meat and dairy, the average world citizen needs to shift to a plant-based diet in order to prevent catastrophic, irreversible environmental damage. The average U.S. and U.K. citizen must consume 90 percent less beef and 60 percent less dairy. How would anyone keep track of that? No animal products for breakfast or lunch. It might not amount to precisely the reductions that are asked for, but it’s just about right, and easy to remember.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“We dramatically overstate the role of science deniers, because it allows science acceptors to feel righteous without challenging us to act on the knowledge we accept. Only 14 percent of Americans deny climate change, which is a significantly lower percentage than who deny evolution, or that the earth orbits the sun. Sixty-nine percent of American voters—including the majority of Republicans—say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“We can think of our atmosphere as a budget and our emissions as expenses: because methane and nitrous oxide are significantly larger greenhouse expenses than CO2 in the short term, they are the most urgent to cut. Because they are primarily created by our food choices, they are also easier to cut.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“According to Project Drawdown, four of the most effective strategies for mitigating global warming are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and collectively shifting to a plant-rich diet. The benefits of these advancements extend far beyond the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and their primary cost is our collective effort.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“It is not enough to say that we want more life; we must refuse to stop saying it. Suicide notes are written once; life notes must always be written-by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, digging up messages from the future, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone's hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer. "Thus we shall make a home together," the soul concludes at the end of the suicide note, perhaps beginning its opposite. Each of us arguing with ourselves, we shall make a home together.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Sometimes I already miss what I haven't yet lost, as if I'm staring through the masterpiece at the empty wall behind it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Instead of traveling beyond the horizon, we could venture into our own consciences and colonize still-uninhabited parts of our internal landscapes.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“I sometimes daydream about going from house to house in my grandmother's shtetl, grabbing the faces of those who would stay, and screaming, "You have to do something!" I have this daydream in a house that I know consumes multiples of my fair share of energy and I know is representative of the kind of voracious lifestyle that I know is destroying our planet. I am capable of imagining one of my descendants daydreaming about grabbing my face and screaming, "You have to do something!" But I am incapable of the belief that would move me to do something. So I know nothing.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Every year, wildfires in California create more greenhouse gas emissions than the state’s progressive environmental policies save.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

“Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better.

[…] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done.

Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth?

If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast