Saturday, February 8, 2014

Bill McKibben: Final Exam for Homo Sapiens


I find as I travel around, that most people understand that we're in a serious fix. Eighty percent of American counties have had some kind of climate disaster in the last two or three years.
Two years ago, the New York City subway system filled with salt system, you know? Sandy was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras. How many warnings do we want?
The world is changing. Things are possible now that weren't before because we're changing the climate.
I mean, it feels like God's doing his level best to tell us the fix that we're in, one crazy episode of weather after another. These are the alarms from a system that's beginning to swing out of control. We're supposed to be Homo sapiens. Intelligence is supposed to be our mark. We've been given the warning by our scientists who have done a terrific job at reaching consensus on a different problem in physics and chemistry. They've told us that we're in deep trouble. They've told us what we need to do, get off fossil fuel. The question now is whether we're actually going to respond to that.
And it's like a sort of, well, it's like a kind of final exam for the question, was the big brain a good adaptation or not, you know? We're going find out in short order. And each of these things that comes up like the Keystone pipeline is a kind of pop quiz along the way. And so far we're failing more of them than we're passing.
 - Bill McKibben
This quote was taken from an interview by Bill Moyers of Bill McKibben that can be found here: http://billmoyers.com/episode/bill-mckibben-to-obama-say-no-to-big-oil/

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