“Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.”

— Bill McKibben (born 1960), in his book The Age of Missing Information, is an environmentalist and writer and a scholar at Middlebury (Vt.) College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.
He lives in Ripton, Vt., where Robert Frost (1874-1963) lived during summers and falls in 1939-1963.