Bill McKibben

It's because every morning when the sun rises above the horizon, it delivers your energy for free.

And if you're Exxon, who spent the last hundred years getting people to write a check every month for their energy, that's the dumbest business plan the world's ever seen.

There is an argument that knowledge is power, and many families would like to know everything, whether it's treatable or not.

Well, I'm very lucky.

I've made it a point to live my life out in the woods as best I can.

And so I live up on the National Forest in the Green Mountains of Vermont.

So I get out every day that I possibly can for a while.

for two reasons.

One, because it's good for my mental health.

And two, because one of the jobs of human beings is that we're the creature capable of bearing witness to the beauty of the earth on which we live.

That's one of the great gifts that comes with consciousness.

And I take that job seriously.

the world's never going to be more intact than it is right now.

And so to be out in it and to revel in it some is part of the reason that we're here, I think, and part of the thing certainly that gives me whatever strength I've got to go on in this kind of work.

Go outside.

And, you know, I used to be just the same way when I lived in the middle of New York City.

I used to write a column about kind of urban naturalist.

I lived in Brooklyn for many years back before Brooklyn became the place to live.

And I used to go out every spring out along the oceanfront because it's one of those places along Jamaica Bay where the horseshoe crabs come up out of the ocean to mate.

It's one of the oldest creatures we know about.