I credit my discovery in 1989 of Bill McKibben's End of Nature with waking me to the climate crisis. I've been reading and taking inspiration from him ever since. Let's spend a class on a bit of his backlist (more at his website), before proceeding to Falter.
- Have you read McKibben before? Had you heard of him, either as an author or in connection with his activism as founder of 350.org?
- "Enormous events can happen quickly... In the last three decades, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased more than 10%... to more than 350 parts per million." That was now six decades ago, he wrote that three decades ago. Are you surprised, disappointed, or shocked that more people weren't more alarmed by the pace of climate change then?
- The brief excerpt from Enough raises the specter of genetic engineering, but is there a sense in which a radically altered climate may also deprive our heirs of "context—meaning—for [their lives]"?
- Was "the invention of the idea of economic growth... almost as significant as the invention of fossil fuel power" in its impact, positive and negative?
- By the end of the '70s 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain." What do you think the numbers are today?
- Are we "a society whose only measure is individual success"?
- Do most of us need to have our eyes opened to "the physicalness of the world"?
- Do you "lament the notion that wildness is vanishing—that every last place had been touched by a human hand"?
- Does "the solution to our environmental problems have more to do with rebuilding working communities..."?
- "Environmentalists clearly weren’t going to outspend the fossil fuel industry, so we’d need to find other currencies: the currencies of movement. Instead of money, passion; instead of money, numbers; instead of money, creativity." Is this strategy working?
- "...it was time to stop changing lightbulbs and start changing systems" - False dilemma
- Plausible?: Sept 12, 2019, TIME Magazine, “Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different”
THE END OF NATURE
BOOK EXCERPT
Nature, we believe, takes forever. It moves with infinite slowness throughout the many periods of its history, whose names we dimly recall from high school biology—the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene. Ever since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path. "So slowly, oh, so slowly have the great changes been brought about," wrote John Burroughs at the turn of the century. "The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to a powder by allowing a gauze veil to float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will have only just begun. Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow." We have been told that man's tenure is as a minute to the earth's day, but it is that vast day which has lodged in our minds. The age of the trilobites began some 600 million years ago. The dinosaurs lived for nearly 140 million years. Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is: Nothing happens quickly. Change takes unimaginable—"geologic"—time.
This idea about time is essentially mistaken. Muddled though they are scientifically, the creationists, believing in the sudden appearance of the earth some seven thousand years ago, may intuitively understand more about the progress of time than the rest of us. For the world as we know it—that is, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, the world in which North America, Europe, and much of the rest of the planet are warm enough to support large human populations—is of quite comprehensible duration. People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some ten or twelve thousand years ago. Using thirty years as a generation, that is three hundred and thirty to four hundred generations ago. Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations in my family—I have seen photos of four. That is, I can think back nearly one-sixtieth of the way to the start of civilization. A skilled geneologist might get me one-thirtieth of the distance back. And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived. From the work of archaeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the pharaohs, which is more than a third of the way. Two hundred and sixty-five generations ago Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls. Two hundred and sixty-five is a large number, but not in the way that six million is a large number—not inscrutably large.
Or look at it this way: There are plants on this earth as old as civilization. Not species—individual plants. The General Sherman tree in California's Sequoia National Park may be a third as old, about four thousand years. Certain Antarctic lichens date back ten thousand years. A specific creosote plant in the Southwestern desert was estimated recently to be 11,700 years of age.
And within that ten or twelve thousand years of civilization, of course, time is not uniform. The world as we really, really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution. the world we actually feel comfortable in dates back to perhaps 1945. It was not until after World War II, for instance, that plastics came into widespread use.
In other words, our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion. True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously. Events, enormous events, can happen quickly. We've known this to be true since Hiroshima, of course, but I don't mean that quickly. I mean that over a year or a decade or a lifetime big and impersonal and dramatic changes can take place. We're now comfortable with the bizarre idea that continents can drift over eons, or that continent can die in an atomic second; even so, normal time seems to us immune to such huge changes. It isn't, though. In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than 10 percent, from about 315 to more than 350 parts per million. In the last decade, an immense "hole" in the ozone layer has opened above the South Pole. In the last half-decade, the percentage of West German forests damaged by acid rain has risen from less than 10 to more than 50. According to the Worldwatch Institute, in 1988—for perhaps the first time since that starved Pilgrim winter at Plymouth—America ate more food than it grew. Burroughs again: "One summer day, while I was walking along the country rode on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility around me, the effect was quite startling . . . It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest."
ENOUGH
Book Excerpt
What will you have done to your newborn when you have installed into the nucleus of every one of her billions of cells a purchased code that will pump out proteins designed to change her? You will have robbed her of the last possible chance for creating context—meaning—for her life. Say she finds herself, at the age of sixteen, unaccountably happy. Is it her being happy—finding, perhaps, the boy she will first love—or is it the corporate product inserted within her when she was a small nest of cells, an artificial chromosome now causing her body to produce more serotonin? Don't think she won't wonder: at sixteen a sensitive soul questions everything. But perhaps you've "increased her intelligence"—and perhaps that's why she is questioning so hard. She won't be sure if even the questions are hers.
DEEP ECONOMY
Chapter One: After Growth
For almost all of human history, said the great economist John Maynard Keynes, from "say, two thousand years before Christ down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was really no great change in the standard of living of the average man in the civilized centers of the earth. Ups and downs, certainly visitations of plague, famine and war, golden intervals, but no progressive violent change." At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living had increased 100 percent over those four thousand years. The reason was, basically, that we didn't learn how to do anything new. Before history began we'd learned about fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion.
And then, in 1712, something new finally happened. A British inventor named Thomas Newcomen developed the first practical steam engine. He burned coal, and used the steam pressure built up in his boiler to drive a pump that, in turn, drained water from coal mines, allowing them to operate far more cheaply and efficiently. How much more efficiently? His engine replaced a team of five hundred horses walking in a circle. And from there—well, things accelerated. In the words of the economist Jeffrey Sachs, "The steam engine marked the decisive turning point of human history." Suddenly, instead of turning handles and cranks with their own muscles or with the muscles of their animals (which had in turn to be fed by grain that required hard labor in the fields), men and women could exploit the earth's storehouse of fossilized energy to do the turning for them. First coal, then oil, then natural gas allowed for everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from making fertilizer to making steel to making electricity. These in turn fed all the subsidiary revolutions in transportation and chemistry and communications, right down to the electron-based information age we now inhabit. Suddenly, one-hundred-percent growth in the standard of living could be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia.
In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil fuel power. It also took a little longer. It's true that by 1776 Adam Smith was noting in The Wealth of Nations that "it is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continued increase" which raises wages. But, as the economist Benjamin Friedman points out in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, his recent and compelling argument for economic expansion, it's "unclear whether the thinkers of the mid-18th century even understood the concept of economic growth in the modern sense of sustained increase over time," or whether they thought the transition to modern commerce was a onetime event—that they'd soon hit a new plateau. The theorists didn't control affairs, though; and the dynamic entrepreneurial actors unleashed by the new economic revolution soon showed that businesses could keep improving their operations, apparently indefinitely. By the early twentieth century, increasing efficiency had become very nearly a religion, especially in the United States, where stopwatch-wielding experts like Frederick Taylor broke every task into its smallest parts, wiping out inefficiencies with all the zeal of a pastor hunting sins, and with far more success. (Indeed, as many historians have noted, religious belief and economic expansion were soon firmly intertwined: "economic effort, and the material progress that it brought, were central to the vision of moral progress," notes Friedman.) Soon, as Jeremy Rifkin observes, the efficiency revolution encompassed everything, not just factory work but homemaking, schoolteaching, and all the other tasks of modern life: "efficiency became the ultimate tool for exploiting both the earth's resources in order to advance material wealth and human progress." As the nation's school superintendents were warned at a meeting in 1912, "the call for efficiency is felt everywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, and the demand is becoming more insistent every day." As a result, "the schools as well as other business institutions, must submit to the test of efficiency." It was a god from whom there was no appeal.
Even so, policy makers and economists didn't really become fixated on growing the total size of the economy until after World War II. An economic historian named Robert Collins recently described the rise of what he called "growthmanship" in the United States. During the Great Depression, he pointed out, mainstream economists thought the American economy was "mature." In the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "our industrial plant is built. . . . Our last frontier has long since been reached. . . . Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand . . . of adapting economic organizations to the service of the people." It was left to former president Herbert Hoover to protest that "we are yet but on the frontiers of development," that there were "a thousand inventions in the lockers of science . . . which have not yet come to light." And Hoover, of course, did not carry the day. Even a decade later, as the country began to emerge from hardship with the boom that followed Pearl Harbor, many businessmen—the steelmakers, the utility executives, the oilmen—were reluctant to build new plants, fearing that overproduction might bring on another depression.
But they were wrong. Mobilization for war proved just how fast the economy could grow; by 1943, even in the midst of battle, the National Resources Planning Board sent this report to Roosevelt: "Our expanding economy is likely to surpass the wildest estimates of a few years back and is capable of bringing to all of our people freedom, security and adventure in richer measure than ever before in history." From that point on, growth became America's mantra, and then the world's. Hoover had been right—there were all kinds of technological advances to come. Plastics. Cars that kept dropping in price. Television. Cheap air-conditioning that opened whole regions of the country to masses of people.
Per capita gross national product grew 24 percent between 1947 and 1960, and during that year's presidential election John F. Kennedy insisted he could speed it up if the voters would only reject "those who have held back the growth of the U.S." Indeed, he proved correct: between 1961 and 1965, GNP grew more than 5 percent a year while the percentage of Americans living in poverty dropped by nearly half. Economists scrambled to catch up, and in doing so they built the base for modern growth theory. The general mood was captured by Lyndon Johnson, who, not long after moving into the White House, told an aide: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all. . . . We can do it if we believe it." And he wasn't the only one. From Moscow Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system."
There were hiccups along the way, as Robert Collins points out in his account. LBJ's belief that we could do anything led us deep into Vietnam, which in turn led us into inflation and recession. The oil shocks of the 1970s and the spectacles of burning rivers and smoggy cities led some, even outside what was then called the counterculture, to question the idea of endless expansion. In 1972, a trio of MIT researchers published a series of computer forecasts they called Limits to Growth, and a year later the German-British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful, with its commitment to what he called "Buddhist economics" and its exhortation to people to "work to put our own inner house in order." (Four years later, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter even received him at the White House.) By the end of the 1970s, their message resonated: the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain."
That kind of ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure," and in 1980 Ronald Reagan's election proved his point. Reagan convinced us it was "Morning in America" again, and under various banners—supply-side economics, globalization—it has stayed morning ever since. Out with limits, in with Drumpf. The collapse of communism drove the point home, and now mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of what can flog the economy faster. The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to use the acronym TINA to underscore her contention that There Is No Alternative to a world fixated on growth. But conservatives weren't the only ones enamored of growth. Lawrence Summers, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the Treasury, put it like this: the Democratic administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." (Emphasis added.) Even that was not enough—in the vice presidential debates during the 1996 campaign, Republican Jack Kemp shouted, "We should double the rate of growth."
People kept seeing new opportunities for faster growth: microtechnology, nanotechnology. (Sometimes the speeding up is literal: "microediting," for instance, now allows call centers and radio stations to edit out pauses and speed up speech with no discernible changes. "We call it the 66-second minute," the president of one firm said recently. "In normal conversation only a small part of the brain is taxed.") The evangelism for efficiency and growth grew louder, too. It was not just, as Benjamin Friedman insists, that a growing economy gets us more stuff—"better food, bigger houses, more travel"—but that it makes us better people: more open, more tolerant, more confident. The "quality of our democracy—more fundamentally, the moral character of American society—is at risk," he said, unless we grow the economy more vigorously. As the new millennium began, growth had become the organizing ideology for corporations and individuals, for American capitalists and Chinese communists, for Democrats and Republicans. For everyone. "Harnessing the 'base' motive of material self-interest to promote the common good is perhaps the most important social invention mankind has achieved," said Charles Schultze, a former chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. George Gilder, the fervent apostle of tech-driven high-growth economics, went further: entrepreneurs, he said, "embody and fulfill the sweet and mysterious consolations of the Sermon on the Mount." The so-called Washington consensus dominated far more of the world than the Union Jack ever had; it was an empire of the mind.
And it is easy to understand why. For one thing, under present arrangements any faltering of growth leads quickly to misery: to recession and all its hardships. For another, endless growth allows us to avoid hard choices, to reconcile, in Collins's words, the American "love of liberty with its egalitarian pretensions." The administration of George W. Bush assures us that we can have tax cuts and still protect Social Security because the tax cuts will stimulate economic growth so much that we'll have more than enough cash on hand to take care of our old. No need to choose. Having found what has been truly a magic wand, the strong temptation is to keep waving it.
But, as readers of fairy tales know, magic can run out. Three fundamental challenges to the fixation on growth have emerged. One is political: growth, at least as we now create it, is producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress. This is both the most common and least fundamental objection to our present economy, and I will spend relatively little time on it. By contrast, the second argument draws on physics and chemistry as much as on economics; it is the basic objection that we do not have the energy needed to keep the magic going, and can we deal with the pollution it creates? The third argument is both less obvious and even more basic: growth is no longer making us happy. These three objections mesh with each other in important ways; taken together, they suggest that we'll no longer be able to act wisely, either in our individual lives or in public life, simply by asking which choice will produce More.
Let's begin with the simplest objection, the one that fits most easily into our current political debates. Though our economy has been growing, most of us have relatively little to show for it. The median wage in the United States is the same as it was thirty years ago. The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily: they earned $27,060 in real dollars in 1979, $25,646 in 2005. Even for those with four-year college degrees, and even though productivity was growing faster than it has for decades, earnings fell 5.2 percent between 2000 and 2004 when adjusted for inflation, according to the most recent data from White House economists. Much the same thing has happened across most of the globe; in Latin America, for instance, despite a slavish devotion to growth economics, real per capita income is the same as a quarter century ago. More than eighty countries, in fact, have seen per capita incomes fall in the last decade.
The mathematics that makes possible this seeming contradiction between rapid growth and individual stagnation is the mathematics of inequality. Basically, almost all the growing wealth accumulates in a very few (silk-lined) pockets. The statistics are such that even an arch-conservative commentator like Dinesh D'Souza calls them "staggering." Between 1997 and 2001, according to a pair of Northwestern University economists, the top 1 percent of wage earners "captured far more of the real national gain in income than did the bottom 50 percent." Economists calculate a "Gini coefficient" to measure income inequality across a society; the U.S. coefficient has risen steadily since the late 1960s, to the point where many economists believe wealth is more stratified today than any time since the Gilded Age. And that gap will continue to grow: the 2006 round of tax cuts delivers 70 percent of its benefits to the richest 5 percent of Americans, and 6.5 percent to the bottom 80 percent.
Economists can't explain all the underlying reasons for this spreading gap. The decline of unions had something to do with it, and so did the advent of computerization. Clearly, in a globalized economy, workers in the rich world now find themselves competing with far more people than they used to—and since per capita income is $1,700 in China, it will be a long time before that playing field levels. With the spread of the Internet, the number of jobs that can be transferred across continents has grown exponentially. Beyond all that, though, there's the simple ideology of growth. Bill Clinton signed us up for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and all the rest with the promise that international trade would spur efficiency and thereby increase growth. George W. Bush sold his massive tax cut with the argument that it would "get the economy moving." Every argument for raising minimum wages or corporate taxes, on the other hand, meets the response that such measures would stifle our economic growth. Growth is always the final answer, the untrumpable hand, and its logic keeps inequality growing, too.
Any debate on these issues has been muffled in the last few decades; the growth consensus usually carried the day without much trouble, in part because elite journalists and pundits found themselves on the happy side of the economic chasm. The extremes have become so enormous, though, that debate can't help but emerge, even if only by accident. Take, for example, the juxtaposition of two stories on a recent front page of the New York Times. One concerned the record-setting Christmas bonuses Wall Street executives had received. It quoted a real estate broker who said clients were suddenly shopping for apartments in "the $6 million range" instead of contenting themselves with $4 million digs. "One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon training at his house in upstate New York," the article reports. "It will include a swim-in-place lap pool, a climbing wall, and a fitness center." Another investment banker seemed flummoxed by his windfall: "'I have a sailboat, a motor boat, an apartment, an SUV. What could I possibly need?' After brief reflection, however, he continued: 'Maybe a little Porsche for the Hamptons house.'" Meanwhile, a few columns away, there was a picture of a Mexican farmer in a field of sickly tomatoes. His small cooperative, post-NAFTA, had tried to sell its produce to the global supermarket giants like Ahold, Wal-Mart, and Carrefour, which had moved into the country with their vast capital and their vast commitment to efficiency. Lacking the money to invest in greenhouses and pesticides, however, he and his neighbors couldn't produce the perfectly round fruit the chains' executives demanded. "The stark danger," the reporter Celia Dugger notes, "is that millions of struggling small farmers . . . will go bust and join streams of desperate migrants to America and to the urban slums of their own countries." She closes her story by interviewing Jos� Luis P�rez Escobar, who after twenty years as a Mexican potato farmer, went under and then left for the United States, without his wife and five children. He now earns $6 an hour, working the graveyard shift tending grass at a golf course. Alongside the exhilaration of the flattening earth celebrated by Thomas Friedman, the planet (and our country) in fact contains increasing numbers of flattened people, flattened by the very forces that are making a few others wildly rich.
Even when the question of inequality has been engaged, though, the standard liberal line is to question not expansion but only the way that the new money is spread around. Left-wing "social critics continue to focus on income," says the sociologist Juliet Schor. "Their goals are redistribution and growth." In fact, critics in the Democratic party and the union movement typically demand even faster growth. They're as intellectually invested in the current system as the average CEO.
I agree with the argument for fairness, that we should distribute wealth more equitably both here and around the globe. (In fact, there's persuasive evidence that if all you cared about was growth, the best way to speed it up would be to redistribute income more fairly.) And it's extremely important to bear in mind that we're not, despite the insistence of our leaders, growing wealthier; that is one of several stubborn and counterintuitive facts about the world that will stud this book, undergirding its argument. Growth simply isn't enriching most of us.
But I'm not going to tarry long here, because I also think that a program of redistribution, however wise or moral, will do relatively little to deal with the even more fundamental, and much less discussed, problems that a growth-centered, efficiency-obsessed economy faces. It's to those problems, and to the physical world, that we now turn.
It's useful to remember what Thomas Newcomen was up to when he launched the Industrial Revolution. He was using coal to pump water out of a coal mine. The birth of the Industrial Revolution was all about fossil fuel, and so, in many ways, was everything that followed. We've learned an enormous amount in the last two centuries—our body of scientific knowledge has doubled so many times no one can count—but coal and oil and natural gas are still at the bottom of it all.
And no wonder. They are miracles. A solid and a liquid and a gas that emerge from the ground pretty much ready to use, with their energy highly concentrated. Of the three, oil may be the most miraculous. In many spots on the face of the earth, all you have to do is stick a pipe in the ground and oil comes spurting to the surface. It's compact, it's easily transportable, and it packs an immense amount of energy into a small volume. Fill the tank of my hybrid Honda Civic with ten gallons—sixty pounds—of gasoline and you can move four people and their possessions from New York to Washington, D.C., and back. Coal and gas are almost as easy to use, and coal in particular is often even cheaper to recover—in many places it's buried just a few feet beneath the surface of the earth, just waiting to be taken.
That simple, cheap, concentrated power lies at the heart of our modern economies. Every action of a modern life burns fossil fuel; viewed in one way, modern Western human beings are flesh-colored devices for combusting coal and gas and oil. "Before coal," writes Jeffrey Sachs, "economic production was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of biomass: food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain industrial processes."26 That is, energy depended on how much you could grow. But fossil energy depended on how much had grown eons before, on all those millions of years of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time till they'd turned into strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them.
To understand how valuable, and how irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a few figures. Ethanol is one modern scientific version of using old-fashioned "biomass" (that is, stuff that grows anew each year) for creating energy. It's quite high-tech, backed with billions of dollars of government subsidy. But if you're using corn, as most American ethanol production does, then by the time you've driven your tractor to plant and till and harvest the corn, and your truck to carry it to the refinery, and then powered your refinery to turn the corn into ethanol, the best-case "energy output-to-input ratio" is something like 1.34 to 1. That is, you've spent 100 BTU of fossil energy to get 134 BTU of ethanol. Perhaps that's worth doing, but as Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa points out, "It's not impressive. The ratio for oil (from well to the gas station) is anywhere between 30 and 200," depending on where you drill.27 To go from our fossil fuel world to that biomass world would be a little like going from the Garden of Eden to the land outside its walls, where bread must be earned by "the sweat of your brow."
And east of Eden is precisely where we may be headed. As everyone knows, the last three years have seen a spate of reports and books and documentaries insisting that humanity may have neared or passed the oil peak—that is, the point where those pools of primeval plankton are half used up, where each new year brings us closer to the bottom of the bucket. The major oil companies report that they can't find enough new wells most years to offset the depletion of their old ones; worrisome rumors circulate that the giant Saudi fields are dwindling faster than expected; and, of course, all this is reflected in the rising cost of oil. The most credible predict not a sharp peak but a bumpy ride for the next decade along an unstable plateau, followed by an inexorable decline in supply. So far that seems to be spot-on—highly variable prices, trading higher over time.
One effect of those changes, of course, can be predicted by everyone who's ever sat through Introductory Economics. We should, theory insists, use less oil, both by changing our habits and by changing to new energy sources. To some extent that's what has happened: SUV sales slowed once it appeared high gas prices were here to stay, and the waiting lists for Toyota Priuses were suddenly six months long. Buses and subways drew more riders. People turned down their thermostats a touch, and sales of solar panels started to boom. This is a classic economic response. But it's hard for us to simply park our cars, precisely because cheap oil coaxed us to build sprawling suburbs. And Americans can switch to hybrids, but if the Chinese and the Indians continue to build auto fleets themselves, even if they drive extremely small cars, then the pressure on oil supplies will keep building. Meanwhile, solar power and the other renewables, wondrous as they are, don't exactly replace coal and oil and gas. The roof of my home is covered with photovoltaic panels, and on a sunny day it's a great pleasure to watch the electric meter spin backward, but the very point of solar power is that it's widely diffused, not compacted and concentrated by millennia like coal and gas and oil.
It's different: if fossil fuel is a slave at our beck and call, renewable power is more like a partner. As we shall eventually see, that partnership could be immensely rewarding for people and communities, but can it power economic growth of the kind we're used to? The doctrinaire economist's answer, of course, is that no particular commodity matters all that much, because if we run short someone will have the incentive to develop a substitute. In general, this has proved true in the past—run short of nice big sawlogs and someone invents plywood—but it's far from clear that it applies to fossil fuel, which in its ubiquity and its cheapness is almost certainly a special case. Wars are fought over oil, not over milk, not over semiconductors, not over timber. It's plausible—indeed, it's likely—that if we begin to run short, the nature of our lives may fundamentally change as the scarcity wreaks havoc on our economies. "The essence of the first Industrial Revolution was not the coal; it was how to use the coal," insists Jeffrey Sachs. Maybe he's right, but it seems more likely that fossil fuel was an exception to the rule, a onetime gift that underwrote a onetime binge of growth. In any event, we seem to be on track to find out.
FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING NOW
Introduction
It’s easy to join the global warming movement. We know it’s easy because we all just joined ourselves. None of us has spent long years as organizers. One of us has spent long years mostly as a writer with a little activism on the side; the rest of us haven’t spent long years doing anything except school, because we just got out of college.
But in 2007 we came together to see if we could kick up a fuss about climate change. That January 10, we launched a Web site, StepItUp2007.org. We asked people across the country to start organizing rallies for April 14, to demand that Congress cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. We had no money, and we had no organization, so we had no expectations. Our secret hope, which seemed a little grandiose, was that we might organize a hundred demonstrations for that Saturday, only three months away.
Instead, our idea took off. The e-mails we sent ended up spreading virally, in the way that certain ideas sometimes do on the Internet. People we’d never heard of started signing up on the Web site to host rallies in places we’d never heard of. The electronic pins stuck on our online map got thicker by the week—200, 500, 900. By the time the big day rolled around, there were 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states, ranging from tiny to enormous. It was one of the biggest days of grassroots environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970, covered extensively in the national media and in thousands of local stories across the country.
Along the way we learned a few lessons and we want to share them in this book, which is designed to help you plan and carry out your own ongoing local rallies and campaigns, the way the thousands of organizers we worked with did on April 14, 2007. We agreed to write it because, one, we haven’t quite managed to solve global warming yet and, two, we gained a few hard-earned ideas for how to make the most of two things: local communities and the Internet.
There is no shortage of fine books on activism, from Saul Alinsky’s classic Rules for Radicals through much more recent accounts. Many of them have centered on the very difficult, long-term, and noble task of community organizing—convincing people with too little power to stand up for their rights. We’re mostly talking about something a little simpler here: getting Americans who already care about an issue such as global warming to actually take effective political action. And we think certain things about contemporary America offer both opportunities and pitfalls for organizers. This isn’t the 1960s anymore; an awful lot has changed, even in the last few years.
We had an excellent database to draw on: all the people who organized events for Step It Up and then sent us pictures and reports. We interviewed and surveyed a great many of these organizers to learn what worked and what didn’t, and this book is as much their work as ours. (That’s one reason why any proceeds we receive from sales of the book will go back into the climate change movement.) We also drew on our work organizing the biggest climate change protest march to date, in the summer of 2006, as well as various campus campaigns we’ve been involved in. We wrote this book as if you were getting ready to organize a rally in your community and want practical help thinking it through and pulling it off. For “rally,” you can substitute a lot of other ideas—teach-ins, petition drives, phone-banking, voter-registration drives. Any kind of action or campaign, we think, can benefit from at least some of these tips.
We also think that our experiences offer insights for those working in other social change movements beyond the environment. We’ll be illustrating our points with examples from our experience, but you’ll be able to see pretty easily how they might fit other causes. We’ll provide detailed, nuts-and-bolts advice, but we’re grouping most of our thoughts more thematically, because we’ve found these organizing principles to be powerful.
• Make it credible. You need to know enough about your subject to argue convincingly, but you certainly don’t need to know everything, and you shouldn’t be intimidated by the fact that you’re not an expert.
• Make it snappy. Today, it’s easier to organize ad hoc actions on short notice (thanks mostly to the Internet) and harder to get people to join organizations, come to endless meetings, and so forth (thanks to longer work days, commutes, and the like). So we describe the benefits of short-term campaigning for making your point.
• Make it collaborative. In an age when our leaders are often hopelessly split along partisan lines, it’s actually quite possible, and quite necessary, to reach out to diverse kinds of people to make a stand against something as all-encompassing as global warming. We think sharing an action instead of owning it is key.
• Make it meaningful. People are eager for the chance to do something that shows their real commitment—say, walk for a day (or even a week). In a religious nation, many are eager for the chance to put faith to public use and to take a stand in the places that matter most to them. Moral seriousness makes an important impression.
• Make it creative (and fun!). Along with earnestness, we have found that the best actions are fun to do and fun for others to consider. The environmental movement hasn’t been much of a singing movement for years; art has played too small a role. We describe some ways to involve everyone, from actors to athletes.
• Make it wired. Activism can’t live solely on the Web—virtual petitions and the like aren’t that powerful. We do think, however, that the Internet has become the crucial tool for building momentum behind the kind of actions that can fight global warming, and we think there are some things to understand as you put it to use.
• Make it seductive (to the media). A successful action doesn’t require any coverage at all. But it’s easy to amplify the effect of your hard work if you can get reporters and editors to pay attention. And that’s relatively easy to do if you understand how they think.
• Make it last. Ad hoc organizing can lead to future actions, and the nature of working together in the short term often builds long-term bonds.
We draw largely on our experience with Step It Up 2007 in this book, but we’ve worked on other actions, some of them successful and some not, that have taught us lessons, too. Organizing is extremely interesting work. (Well, most of the time. Sometimes it’s just filing for permits and waiting in line at Kinko’s.) It’s as much about human nature as it is about political strategy, as much about the small issues of how we relate to one another as it is about the big issues of the day.
In his book Blessed Unrest, our friend Paul Hawken said that the movement that is rising to stop global warming and many other planetary inequities will be the largest our planet has ever seen. We want to give you the tools to ensure he’s right. Only three years ago, global warming was off the radar screen for many Americans. Today, it is in the national spotlight and a diverse network of groups is rising to the challenge of stopping it. Hundreds of colleges and universities are working to become carbon neutral, reducing emissions from campuses to zero. Community organizers in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere are taking on polluters and fighting for environmental justice. In Appalachia, rural communities are banding together to fight mountaintop removal, a heartbreaking new method for mining coal from that region. People of faith are organizing their churches, synagogues, and mosques, declaring global warming as the moral crisis of our time. Traditional businesses are greening up, while entrepreneurs are building a clean-energy alternative economy that has the potential to create thousands of new jobs. And this is just the beginning.
Despite the array of groups and organizations working on global warming, we are still missing a key element: the movement. Along with the hard work of not-for-profit lobbyists, environmental lawyers, green economists, sustainability-minded engineers, and forward-thinking entrepreneurs, it’s going to take the inspired political involvement of millions of Americans to get our country on track to solving this problem. Linked up by the Internet and a common vision, we can start to make change from the local level to the national and global. We hope this book will give you the skills and inspiration you need to jump into this growing movement. It’s hard work, but—take it from us—it can be a lot of fun, too.
In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years, we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in Washington DC and around the country have finally created an opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the time to start moving forward, fast.
THE BILL MCKIBBEN READER
Introduction
Looking backward, one can usually discern a trail—find a logic for what at the time seemed spontaneous decisions. These pieces come from the first quarter century of my writing life, all written in the passion of a particular moment, the grip of a new experience or idea. They lack the coherence that a more systematic thinker would have produced—they are the products of a reporter’s imagination, restless and fast-moving. But seen in reverse I can force a certain unity on them. Which is a pleasurable and conceited thing to do with one’s life.
As I was digging through mounds of old clips, I looked at a few essays I’d written for my college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. Mostly I covered City Hall in Cambridge—the police beat and so on. But we were nothing if not full of ourselves, and so we also felt no compunction in taking on the largest subjects of the day. The night that Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, I wrote the news story, got grimly drunk, and spent the next day in bed. When I rose, I wrote three thousand words, most of them jejune, that in retrospect defined the ground I’d cover in the years to come. The election of Reagan was not just a rejection of a hapless Jimmy Carter; it was the choice for a kind of pretend America where we would agree that we didn’t have to face any limits, change any habits. Our commitment to a careening growth economy (just two years after Carter had hosted a reception for E. F. “Small Is Beautiful” Schumacher at the White House) set in motion the events that would punctuate my adulthood, and which are still playing themselves out—we lurched toward a society whose only measure was individual success. It’s in defiance of that trend that I’ve spent the succeeding years writing, often quixotically; it’s that trend whose meaning we can now read in every cubic meter of atmosphere, in every tick mark on the rising thermometer.
For me personally, though, the years after college were delightful. Through a series of flukes I found myself fresh out of college as a staff writer at the New Yorker. I was the youngest person on the staff, and no one else was as interested in the low-paying and (in those days) anonymous job of writing the “Talk of the Town.” For me it was heaven, a license to explore the most entertaining city on earth. These were the last years of William Shawn’s editorship, and we became great friends—our difference in years was so great that instead of the fraught father-child relationships he had with so much of the staff, I got to enjoy the much easier grandfatherly version. And his only real requirement for “Talk” pieces suited me as well—I could write about anything, provided it didn’t involve celebrities or newsmakers. So for five years I churned out oddball thousand-word essays, often three a week, on a man who played spoons in front of the public library or a compulsive author of letters to the editor. For reasons best known to him, he also let me write short political essays for the “Notes and Comment” section at the front of the magazine—for a while, Jonathan Schell and I alternated weeks, and it was from him that I learned how great reporting could produce critical thinking. It was a liberating reprieve from the twin straitjackets of “objective reporting” and “punditry.”
(Mr. Shawn, to whom this book is dedicated, also gave me another gift. He asked me—before it became a cliché—to chronicle New York’s emerging homeless problem by living on the streets. I did so for considerable stretches—one result was the piece in this book about a single day in that period. Another result was the chance to meet my future wife, Sue Halpern, who was a homeless advocate and writer.)
After five years of this charmed life, upheaval arrived in the person of Si Newhouse, who bought the magazine and soon forced Mr. Shawn to resign. I quit the same day—at the time it seemed like high principle at a high cost, but in retrospect it was clearly a blessing. Not only did I avoid the demoralizing decade that followed at the magazine till David Remnick arrived to right the ship, but I also escaped what was in some ways a velvet prison—a writing sinecure so cush that it trapped many an author over the years. The best part for me was the escape route—I’d grown up a good suburban child, and become an urban reporter. But one of the last things I did for the New Yorker was a long piece about where everything in my apartment came from—water, electricity, you name it. It began to open my eyes to the physicalness of the world, the fact that even Manhattan depended on nature, and consumed it, for its existence. (The degree of surprise that this caused me defines, I think, the meaning of American suburbia.) At about the same time, through yet another fluke, I spent six winter weeks at a writing retreat at Blue Mountain Lake, New York, deep in the heart of the Adirondacks. I fell in love with winter and with wilderness and, months later, when the time came to leave the New Yorker, that’s where Sue and I headed. We bought a cheap house way, way out in the biggest woods in the American East (at that time the Adirondacks were cheap, and we were in a particularly poor and remote section) and began to learn how to live a new life, at home in nature.
My love affair with those wild mountains was so intense and instant—I knew I’d found the right landscape for me, just as I knew I’d found the right woman—that it set the stage for what followed. Always an omnivorous consumer of journalism, I’d begun reading the occasional reference to something called the “greenhouse effect.” The more I studied what little science was available, the harder I was hit by the realization that this world I had suddenly woken up to was just as suddenly in mortal danger. The End of Nature sprung, in less than a year’s time, from that realization. It was the first book for a general audience about global warming and hence contained much reporting on the subject, but its heart was a lament for the notion that wildness was vanishing—that every last place had been touched by a human hand.
The book was both successful—it’s now in twenty-four languages—and scorned; Forbes magazine ran a review with a headline urging its readers not to buy it, and Rush Limbaugh went on the attack. But its main meaning for me was to set the task that has dominated my writing and thinking life since: how to come to terms practically, culturally, economically, theologically, politically, and emotionally with this most enormous problem humans have ever faced. The years that followed were in one sense odd. I hoped very much that I’d been wrong about global warming, but with each new scientific report and each new year of record warmth I also felt an undeniable and slightly shameful vindication. I kept tugging at the problem from different directions—in “What’s On” and The Age of Missing Information I tried to figure out why our information culture made it so hard for us to come to grips with real challenges, and for “If You Build It, Will They Change?” and Hope, Human and Wild I traveled the world looking for alternate models. It was also a time of great personal joy—we had a new daughter, Sophie, and we were living in our gorgeous corner of a gorgeous world. Though there were no other writers close to hand (with the vital exception of my wife), I was also finding a literary community—“nature writers” such as Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, David Abram, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, and the like, who became friends and whose work inspired and taught me. It’s been a great privilege to be a small part of that movement, to understand the possibilities for a literary life defined by commitment and service to place and planet.
At the turn of the century we shifted seventy miles east from the Adirondacks to the Green Mountains of Vermont. The cultural distance was further than the topographical—from Appalachia to New England. For me it meant the pleasure of a loose relationship with Middlebury College, and with writers such as John Elder. Perhaps drawing on those experiences, my own work became more insistently focused on the gulf between individual and community—focused, in a sense, on the same choice we’d made in that fateful Reagan-Carter election. I’ve come to think that the solution to our environmental problems has more to do with rebuilding working communities even than with reworking our engines and appliances: the essay “(Tod) Murphy’s Law” and my most recent book, Deep Economy, are efforts to make that case, and also to explore the ways that community might provide some of the pleasure that seems so rare in a consumer economy devoted to the quick and easy.
In recent years my life has taken another turn too. In despair at the lack of political action about global warming, even in the face of ever more dire science, I’ve turned increasingly to helping organize Americans to demand change, “Speaking Up for the Environment” an early example. After spearheading a successful march across Vermont in August of 2006, I began working with half a dozen incredibly talented recent graduates of Middlebury to organize a pair of nationwide protests. Step It Up, as we’ve called our efforts, has been a success—in April of 2007 we organized 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states, the biggest day of grassroots environmental protest since Earth Day 1970. I’m as proud of that work as of anything I’ve written. Indeed, I have become a student of a new genre: the e-mail designed to set protest in motion.
I hope that some of the pieces in this book move you to reflect, or better yet to laugh. Taken as a whole, however, I hope they help move you to act.
AN EXCERPT FROM OIL AND HONEY
The Education of an Unlikely Activist
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1
Two Lives
Here’s a story of two lives lived in response to a crazy time—a time when the Arctic melted and the temperature soared, a time when the planet began to come apart, a time when bee populations suddenly dropped in half. Each story is extreme. They’re not intended as suggestions for how others should live, and I hope the reader won’t feel the need to choose, or reject, either one. Each story is mine, at least in part, for sometimes I think I’ve learned more in the past two years than in all the decades that came before. Some of that education came in the tumult and conflict of my own life, as I helped to build an active resistance to the fossil fuel industry. And some came in the beeyards of my home state, while I carefully watched a very different, very beautiful way of dealing with a malfunctioning modernity. These stories mesh together, I hope: awkwardly right now, but perhaps, with luck, more easily in the time to come.
•••
I first met Kirk Webster in the fall of 2001. Newly ensconced at Middlebury College in Vermont, I’d offered to teach a course on local food production. There were two problems. One, I can’t really grow anything—my heart is green, but not my thumb. Two, this was long before Michael Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver had taken up local agriculture, and there wasn’t really much to read. We could choose among the remarkable essays of Wendell Berry, the seductive novels of Wendell Berry, and the tough poems of Wendell Berry. Looking through back issues of a magazine called Small Farmer’s Journal, however, I came across an essay by a beekeeper named Kirk Webster. I’m not sure I noticed, the first time I read it, that he was a neighbor. I was just taken by his confident prose and his descriptions of his life among the honeybees.
“Surely the best kept secret in the U.S. today is the wonderful way of life that’s possible with full-time farming on a small place,” he began. “If more people understood the opportunities for faith, freedom, responsibility, health and education that good farming can provide, our rural areas might be repopulated and the self-destructive course of our society reversed. This timeless activity is so much more than just a way of making a living—it is in fact the Middle Path described in the Buddha’s teachings and the object of St. Thomas’s words: ‘The kingdom of heaven surrounds you, but you see it not.’ ”
He was, it turned out, living in the next town over, and easy to track down via the small-farmer grapevine; he agreed to come to class and talk. I don’t recall everything he said that day, but I do remember my first impression: he was bearded, shy, and a little ill at ease, but we all took to him instantly. Even the students who had no intention of becoming farmers—the ones bound for finance or medicine or the other high-powered careers you leave for from a place like Middlebury—were shaken a little by his quiet resolution, and by his story.
He’d grown up in suburban New Jersey (like many of them), in a family he described in his essay as “largely dysfunctional and aimless” (so, not unlike a lot of them). “I always liked to read, and I didn’t have trouble getting good grades, so everyone assumed I would be able to get scholarships and somehow continue as far as possible with ‘education.’ ” By the age of fifteen, though, “it was clear that I was soon going to seek elsewhere for something to do in my life.” Nature and the outdoors world had become an “irresistible magnet,” and so in order that he earn some kind of diploma his parents sent him to the Mountain School in farm country Vermont, a rural outpost that grew its own food and cut its own firewood, and where he was all but adopted by one of the families whose parents taught at the school. Bill and Martha Treichler, and their boys and girls, taught him how to garden and to build and to do the hundreds of other jobs of rural self-sufficiency; he suddenly had a model that made sense—a joyful and tight farm family who were living outside the normal economy.
“One evening, just before dinner in the noisy school dining hall,” he wrote, “Bill told me that the year their fifth child was born, the family’s gross income was $600. I almost dropped the pitcher of milk I was holding. The sights and sounds in the room started to spin, and I felt like someone had just hit me right between the eyes with a stick of cordwood. Here were the most capable, healthiest, and best educated people I had ever met, who with five young children at home, had chosen a way of life with only $600 of cash income (perhaps equivalent to $2,400 today). They certainly could have pursued any number of jobs or careers to make a normal income, but chose instead to be together as a family and pick and choose carefully which aspects of the larger society they would get involved with. Farming and healthy self-sufficient living in a debt-free situation allowed them to do this. In that moment in the dining hall, all of my developing notions of making a living, security, jobs and careers were shattered, and I knew I would have to start again in learning what these things really mean.”
That moment ramified. When he was wracked up in a toboggan accident that winter, someone gave him a book on beekeeping, and it captured his imagination; home on vacation in New Jersey he found an octogenarian Ukrainian immigrant who needed help with his hives. That man told him about another—Charlie Mraz, in Vermont’s Champlain Valley, and when Kirk returned to school he hitchhiked across the state to ask the veteran apiarist for a job. He worked there for two years after high school, eating meals with the family but sleeping in the honey house. And then, still a very young man, he struck off across the country, working on a variety of farms and doing carpentry to pay his bills. Everywhere he went he built up small apiaries, honing his skills, and in the fall of 1985 he returned to the Champlain Valley and began his life’s work, raising bees and selling colonies, queens, and honey. Slowly, patiently, and in the face of growing problems with mites that were decimating many apiaries, he built his business into a going concern, pioneering a number of new techniques and becoming one of the very few beekeepers in the country who made a living without using chemicals in his hives. It was a decent living, too—when he came to my class that day, he bought his books with him, and showed us that Champlain Valley Bees and Queens, Inc., was grossing $50,000 a year, of which about half netted out. “After living, and enjoying life, for so long with so little money, this frankly seems like an enormous fortune to me,” he said. “In terms of the American greedy lifestyle, it’s still not very much money. But I consider it to be a more than ample reward for the independence, the wonderful way of life, and the chance to live apart from a predatory society that beekeeping and farming provide.”
He was, in other words, leading a somewhat Amish life, with the obvious exception that he wasn’t surrounded by an Amish community where everyone else was living likewise. There are other small farmers in the valley, and they were his friends; nonetheless, he was, perhaps, a little lonely—more on that later. But the deeper problem went like this: he thought his farming wouldn’t truly matter until he could pass on what he’d learned. “If there are young people anymore, interested in beekeeping, I’d like to have a few of them come here to learn the trade,” he wrote. “This is still in the planning stage, but it should be possible to expand the apiary enough to support one or two apprentices, then spin off the excess bees as the young folks return home to start propagating bees and producing honey on their own. If even one or two full-time apiaries resulted from this process, I’d be able to at least approach my own definition of successful farming.”
As the decade wore on, I’d see Kirk now and again—have him over for dinner or meet him for a cross-country ski. And so I knew he was shepherding his apiary through the most difficult decade in beekeeping history, surviving everything from the colony collapse disorder that killed so many beehives to the flood of cheap (and adulterated) Chinese honey that threatened to wreck the market. He’d continued to follow his unorthodox route. Instead of trucking his bees to California, like most apiarists, to cash in on the almond pollination season, he kept them close to home all year round, and worked diligently to rid his apiary of all trace of chemicals. And it had worked—but not well enough for him to take on the apprentices he’d wanted. He had no farm of his own, so he lived in a rented home on a small patch of land and had his shop nearby; his colonies were, as with most apiaries, spread out at a dozen locations around the valley. It all worked, but there was no room for young people to come, stay, and learn. And there was no land to make the apiary the hub of something even sweeter, a small farm with crops and animals. Had he lived some other place, he could have done it, but the cost of land in Vermont is unnaturally high—New York and Boston are within driving distance, and so prices get set less by what a farmer can earn than by what a stockbroker can afford.
It became clear to me that the moment was passing—Kirk is strong and healthy, but he’s got another decade at his peak, I’d guess. If he was going to pass on what he knew, the time was ripe. And I, too, felt a strong urge to have a more-than-theoretical connection to the landscape and the emerging local economy that I was writing so much about. So I made him a proposal: What if I buy you a piece of land and grant you free lifetime tenure on it? In return, you build the farm buildings and get the land working, and pay the insurance and taxes. By any global standard, I’m a rich man. But I’m not in the class of people who buy farms willy-nilly. Still, I’ve always wanted something tangible to leave my daughter; since Kirk and I are about the same age, she should be the ultimate beneficiary, inheriting the operation when Kirk died. Given what I knew about climate change, the gift of productive land seemed like the best thing I could hope to pass on to her, an insurance policy worth more than money in some account. In the meantime, Kirk could fulfill his farming destiny.
Kirk agreed, and I went looking for the money—as it turns out, the check for this book covered the down payment. And together we started the search for land, wandering one property after another. There was no shortage of possibilities—every month a few more dairy farms disappear, done in by the low price of commodity milk and the impossibility of competing with the giant ten-thousand-head megadairies of the West. We looked at many, but they were hard worn, their outbuildings crumbling after a few decades of cash-strapped deferred maintenance. We eventually checked in with the Vermont Land Trust, which has been conserving farmland around the state for decades. (It works like this: a farmer decides that instead of selling off his land in lots for vacation homes, he’ll sell the development rights to VLT; he can keep farming, and the land will stay intact.) VLT connected us with a farmer who wanted to unload—after selling his development rights he’d gotten sick of the entire farming business altogether and moved on to California, and now his seventy-acre parcel outside the town of New Haven was just sitting there. There was a driveway and one double-wide trailer. The land was pretty near the geographic center of Kirk’s various beeyards around the county, and when we tested the well the water flowed pretty well. With the great help of our lawyer friend Dick Foote we managed finally to settle the deal. The farm wasn’t especially picturesque—the neighbor directly to the west ran a noisy excavating business, and the fields were rimmed with scrubby sumac. But some of the soil was rich loam, not the standard Champlain Valley clay. And the woodlot was plenty large enough to keep Kirk in firewood forever. We both knew it was the place.
The double-wide would serve for the someday apprentices; the first order of business, in that spring of 2011, was to get a barn built, and then, if his money held out, a small farmhouse, where Kirk was pretty sure he’d spend the rest of his life. This new operation would not change the world, both of us knew that. But it would, you know, change the world. The sum total of a million of these kind of small shifts would be a different civilization, one you could just begin to sense emerging as farmer’s markets spread across the nation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had just announced a seismic demographic shift: For the first time in 150 years the number of farms in America was no longer falling. In fact, over the past half decade, it had begun inexorably to rise. All the growth was coming at the small end of the business, with people growing food for their neighbors. Vermont was a case in point: dairies continued to disappear, but we suddenly had neighbors growing wheat and barley—the kind of crops we hadn’t seen for a century in this state. The number of farmers in the United States was still small—just 1 percent, or half the proportion of the population behind prison bars. But something had definitely begun to turn. Given enough time . . .
Time, of course, was the trouble. Offered a century’s grace, I have no doubt we could subside into a workable, even beautiful, civilization. But 2011, when Kirk and I bought the farm, was shaping up to be one of the warmest years on record. As that summer wore on, we saw record heat in the Southwest and a drought so deep it killed five hundred million trees in Texas. Meanwhile, there was record rainfall across the Mississippi Basin, and the river swelled so fast that the Army Corps of Engineers was blowing up levees and flooding farmland to try to save cities from inundation.
Those were the facts of my life, those and a million other such stories and statistics. For twenty-five years—almost my entire adulthood—I’d been working on what we first called the greenhouse effect, and then global warming, and then climate change. Back in 1989, when Kirk was building his first apiaries, I was writing my first book, which was also the first book on the topic for nonscientists. The End of Nature was a best seller, translated into a couple of dozen languages, and my initial theory (I was still in my twenties) was that people would read the book—and then change.
That’s not quite how it happened, so I kept on writing, one book after another, about some aspect of this great crisis. I wrote articles, too, for just about every magazine you could name, and op-eds, and when blog posts became a thing I wrote those. I assumed, like most people, that reason would eventually prevail—that given the loud alarm sounded by scientists, governments would take care of the problem. And for a while that seemed, fitfully, to be happening. I was in Kyoto in 1998 when the world’s nations signed the first accord to staunch the flow of carbon dioxide, and I remember thinking that we’d turned a corner. It was going to be close, I thought, but we were headed in the right direction.
That’s not quite how it happened, either. As it turned out, the United States never ratified the Kyoto accord, and soon China was building a coal plant a week. Carbon emissions kept soaring, and donations from the fossil fuel industry managed to turn one of our two political parties into climate deniers and the other party into cowards. Power, not reason, was ascendant, and writing yet another story about the latest scientific findings seemed less and less useful. By 2009, a decade after Kyoto, the U.S. Senate—then with sixty Democrats—was so scared of Big Oil that it wouldn’t even take a vote on the most modest, tepid climate legislation imaginable. And six months later the world convened in Copenhagen for a failed climate summit that killed any hope of global progress.
Sometime in the course of the past decade I figured out that I needed to do more than write—if this fight was about power, then we who wanted change had to assemble some. Environmentalists clearly weren’t going to outspend the fossil fuel industry, so we’d need to find other currencies: the currencies of movement. Instead of money, passion; instead of money, numbers; instead of money, creativity.
At first—this was 2006—I had no clue at all. I called a few Vermont writer friends of mine, and asked if they’d come to our main city, Burlington, and sit in on the steps of the federal building. We’d be arrested, there’d be a small story in the paper, we’d have done something. They agreed—but one of them called the police and asked what would happen to us. “Nothing,” was the reply. “Sit there as long as you want.” So instead I asked people to walk across Vermont—we left from Robert Frost’s old summer writing cabin, which is near my house, and walked for five days, sleeping in farm fields along the way. By the time we got to Burlington there were a thousand people marching, which in Vermont is a lot—enough, as it turned out, to get all our candidates for federal office (even the Republicans) to sign a pledge that they’d work in Congress to cut carbon emissions dramatically.
The next day, though, a newspaper account called that protest the largest demonstration against climate change that had yet taken place in the United States, and suddenly I understood better why we were losing. We had the superstructure of a movement: scientists, economists, policy experts, Al Gore. In fact, all we were lacking for a real movement was the movement part, the surge of people that produces respect and maybe even a little fear in leaders. Activists on the front lines were doing superb work fighting individual power plants and coal mines, but they weren’t getting the support they needed—it wasn’t adding up fast enough. So we set out to build one.
When I say “we,” I mean me and a small team of undergraduates at Middlebury College, where I teach. We’d met one another in those long days of walking across Vermont, and I’d been deeply impressed by their budding talents and their good cheer. So that winter we launched a campaign called Step It Up, and in the course of three months created a springtime day of action that coordinated 1,400 protests across all fifty states. (The one in North Dakota was small.) We were successful in part because of beginner’s luck and in part because my young colleagues knew more about the Internet than the rest of the environmental movement put together. Mostly, though, we were pushing on an open door—there were plenty of people who were deeply concerned about global warming but felt powerless in its face. When we finally offered them the chance to unite their voices, they took it eagerly. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, then running for president, took note of the rallies, and a few days later changed their platforms to reflect our goal: an 80 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. We were feeling . . . smug.
But a few weeks later, in the summer of 2007, the Arctic began to melt, breaking all previous records. Clearly climate change was coming faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had thought, and 2050 was no longer all that relevant. We’d need to work faster, on a larger scale. NASA’s James Hansen, the planet’s premier climate scientist, provided us with a number: in January 2008, his team published a paper showing that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose above 350 parts per million, we couldn’t have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” (Five years later we’re closing in on 400 parts per million—that’s why the Arctic is melting.) We took 350.org for our name, reasoning that we wanted to work all over the world (they don’t call it global warming for nothing) and that Arabic numerals crossed linguistic boundaries. And then we took a leap of faith that in retrospect seems ludicrous—since there were seven continents, each of those seven young people working with me took a chunk of one and we set to work: Kelly Blynn on South America, Jeremy Osborn in Europe, Phil Aroneanu in Africa, Will Bates on the Indian subcontinent, Jamie Henn in the rest of Asia, May Boeve at home in North America, and Jon Warnow on the antipodes (he also got the Internet). Our success the year before meant that a couple of foundations (the Rockefellers, the Schumanns) were willing to help fund our work, and so the rest of the team was getting paid small salaries, and they had money to travel. But how do you just land in, say, Vietnam or Peru or Kazakhstan and start “organizing”? We found out.
The seven kids did endless work—literally endless, since going global meant there was always someone awake somewhere to e-mail. Mostly we found people like ourselves—there aren’t “environmentalists” everywhere, but there’s always someone worried about public health or hunger or war and peace. (Worried, that is, about all the hopes that will be wrecked if the planet starts to fail.) Though most of them were poor, and hence living lives a world apart from that of New England college students, they were natural allies, quick to understand both the science and the politics. And so by the fall of 2009, we were ready to hold our first global day of action. It was beyond exciting watching the pictures pour in—there were 5,200 rallies in 181 countries, what CNN called “the most widespread day of action in the planet’s history.” We followed it up with three more big global extravaganzas—thousands of demonstrations everywhere, save North Korea. There are forty thousand images in the Flickr account—I can show you pictures from Mongolia and Mumbai and Mozambique, from Montreal and Mombasa and Mauritania. From almost everywhere. We did our part to educate the world about what was coming at it.
But if you’ve built a movement, you’ve eventually got to put it to work. And now “eventually” had come. Education needed to yield to action.
So while Kirk was starting to build his barn in that early summer of 2011, I was stepping off a small cliff into the next phase of my life. To this point I’d been able to pretend that I was mostly a writer who happened to be helping with some activism—that our global climate education project was a natural extension of the work I’d spent my life doing. But now I was getting ready to do something different: to pick a tough, visible fight with the strongest possible adversaries on the biggest political stage in the world. Global warming was accelerating—2010 had just set the new record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was time to pick up the pace and move from engagement to resistance.
And so, at least for the two years described here, I’ve made the transition, however reluctantly, from author-activist to activist. Except for a few blessed interludes in the beeyards, I’ve spent my time on the computer and the airplane and the phone, giving speeches and leading marches. I’ve willed myself to be someone other than who I had been. The strain has told; I’ve changed, and not always for the best. This is the story of that education.
I miss, sometimes desperately, the other me: the one who knew lots about reason and beauty and very little about the way power works; the one with time to think. But time, as I say, is what we’re lacking.
As it happened, I’d spent the spring of 2011 teaching a course at Middlebury. “Social Movements, Theory and Practice,” it was called—but since these were the opening months of the Arab Spring it was mostly practice. We watched YouTube videos of young Egyptians organizing epic marches, and brave Libyans standing up to their tyrant Muammar Gadhafi. And we read Taylor Branch’s classic three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights years, which might as well be a handbook for organizers—it’s so full of behind-the-scenes details that you could see exactly how Dr. King had dealt with every problem we’d face, from stubborn presidents to (far harder) stubborn colleagues from the large civil rights organizations.
By the time I was done with the semester, I’d decided that 350.org should organize the first major civil disobedience action for the climate movement. I sensed, from the speeches I was giving and the e-mail that flowed in hourly, that people were ready for a deeper challenge—it was time to stop changing lightbulbs and start changing systems. If we were going to shake things up, we’d need to use the power King had tapped: the power of direct action and unearned suffering. We’d need to go to jail.
And at precisely that moment, an issue materialized out of thin, if dirty, air. In the spring of 2011 Jim Hansen published a small paper pointing out that “peak oil” was not, in fact, happening quite as expected—that though we were indeed running out of easy-to-tap sweet crude, the newly emerging category of “unconventional oil,” and in particular the tar sands of Canada, contained huge amounts of carbon. Those Albertan tar sands, he wrote, were so gigantic that if we burned them in addition to everything else we were burning, it would be “game over for the climate.”
His calculations put a sudden spotlight on a previously little-known pipeline proposal called Keystone XL that was designed to carry almost a million barrels a day of that tar sands oil south from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Native leaders in Canada had been fighting tar sands mining for years, because it had wrecked their lands—only 3 percent of the oil had been pumped out, but already the world’s biggest bulldozers and dump trucks had moved more earth than was moved building the planet’s ten biggest dams, the Great Wall of China, and the Suez Canal combined. And some ranchers in the United States had begun to rally along the planned route of the pipeline itself, particularly in Nebraska, where it was destined to run straight across the iconic Sandhills and atop the Ogallala Aquifer that irrigates the Great Plains. But these protests hadn’t gained enough traction to stop the plan. Keystone XL awaited only a presidential permit.
That was the part that interested me. An old law, mainly used for things such as building a bridge between New Brunswick and Maine, required presidents to declare that any infrastructure crossing our country’s border was “in the national interest.” Congress didn’t need to act, which was good since I knew there was no possible way to even think about convincing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to block the pipeline. But this decision would be made by Barack Obama, and Barack Obama was fifteen months away from an election. Maybe we had an opening to apply some pressure—an opening to see if we’d nurtured a climate movement strong enough to make a difference.
And so I called the native leaders, who’d been fighting the longest, and asked if it was okay if we joined in. They graciously refrained from pointing out we were late to the game, and promised to collaborate (a promise they would keep in spectacular fashion in the year ahead). And then I called the small but hardy band of environmental campaigners in Nebraska and in Washington, D.C., who had been trying to block the pipeline. If we demanded more dramatic action, I asked, would it somehow damage their efforts? “We’re losing,” they said. “We have no deal for you to damage. Going to jail can’t hurt.”
Our small crew at 350.org—still run by those seven young people, now fully grown and highly able organizers—talked it through. We knew it was a gamble, but when you’re behind, you take risks. (The slow, easy, sensible trajectories for dealing with climate change were in the past now; sometimes I had to restrain myself from saying to some “moderate” politician, “If only you’d listened to me a quarter century ago. . . .”) And when you’re losing you take personal risks, too; I sensed I was stepping over a line. With no idea how it would all come out, I sat down and wrote a letter, which I circulated to a few of my friends to cosign. It went out into the far reaches of the Web in June 2011, and it was as blunt as I could make it.
Dear Friends,
This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the Internet age—it’s serious stuff.
The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will quite possibly get you arrested.
The full version goes like this:
As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.
And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.
These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of “national interest” to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on Earth. These corporations want to build the so-called Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.
To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Ogallala Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using “state of the art” technologies that should leak only once every seven years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.
As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. “Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we’re going to be stuck,” Ralph Glass, an economist and vice president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.
Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the administration has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as three hundred power plants operating at full bore.
And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s “inclined” to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry.
So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Déné indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.
And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces. We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid-August many of us will use them. We will, each day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere—are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business.
And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young senator who told us that with his election the “rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.” We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure his government for change. We’ll do what we can.
One more thing: we don’t just want college kids to be the participants in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—ten thousand came to D.C. for the Power Shift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; a young man named Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest.
Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere to step up, too, just as many of us did in earlier battles for civil rights or for peace. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.
This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, till the administration understands we won’t go away. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision makers need to know they’re being watched.
Twenty years of patiently explaining the climate crisis to our leaders hasn’t worked. Maybe moral witness will help. You have to start somewhere, and we choose here and now.
We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.
Maude Barlow—Chair, Council of Canadians
Wendell Berry—Author and Farmer
Danny Glover—Actor
Tom Goldtooth—Director, Indigenous Environmental Network
James Hansen—Climate Scientist
Wes Jackson—Agronomist, President of the Land Institute
Naomi Klein—Author and Journalist
Bill McKibben—Writer and Environmentalist
George Poitras—Mikisew Cree First Nation
Gus Speth—Environmental Lawyer and Activist
David Suzuki—Scientist, Environmentalist, and Broadcaster
Joseph B. Uehlein—Labor Organizer and Environmentalist
It’s the kind of letter where you sit there with your hand above the send button and just kind of wonder how much your life is going to change. As it turned out, a lot.
One reason I find it hard to ask people to come to D.C. and get arrested: part of me thinks, strongly, we should stay home. Or at least that I should.
Yes, because it takes energy to travel. Yes, it has, in fact, occurred to me that there’s something remarkably ironic about my flying around the world to build a climate movement. I do it because I think the math works: if we can stop Keystone, that’s nine hundred thousand barrels a day for the fifty-year life of the pipeline. But it always nags at me, that surge of power at the top of the runway as the jet engines guzzle fuel to get us aloft. I tell myself that we fight this fight in the world we live in, not the one we hope to build.
But we do need to build that world, and that’s even more why we should stay home; it’s why Kirk’s project attracts me. It’s clear to me that we can’t have precisely the same economy that we’ve grown up with, not the globe-spanning anything-at-any-time consumerism, not the starter-castles-for-entry-level-monarchs housing stock, not the every-man-a-Denali/Tahoe/Escalade driveway. We’re going to have to change our patterns, our laws, our economies, our expectations. My last few books have focused on the possibilities for local food, local energy, local currency—and the appeal for me is not just or even mainly intellectual.
I found the mountains surrounding Lake Champlain as a fairly young man. I’d moved to the Adirondacks at the age of twenty-six, falling in love with the sheer wildness of the place, a bigger tract of protected land than Glacier, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite combined. A child of the suburbs, I was knocked over by the contact with hot, cold, wet; it was no different than any other incandescent young love, except that it has burned on for years. Hemlock bowing across the stream, red pine needles baking in the August sun high on the ridge, coyotes yipping in the night, sky so black the Milky Way stretches to each horizon; all of it was a revelation. (In fact, the dominant emotion of The End of Nature was not fear but sadness—a lament for the wildness that climate change threatened to leach away.) Just to say the names calms me down: Ampersand Mountain, Thirteenth Lake, Raquette River.
After fifteen years my wife and my daughter and I moved fifty miles across the lake to Vermont, sacrificing a little of the wildness for the strong sense of community that defines the Green Mountain State: the town meeting, the farmer’s market, the microbrewery. These are places that might be made to work: the Adirondacks is the best example of a wilderness with people living in and among it; Vermont the best example of an earlier American state of mind, before the hyper-individualism of the TV age completely took over.
There’s so much to be done here at home; you can sense the new world coming into embryonic form, with its own sources of everything from seeds to capital. And for me, even more, it’s the landscape that fits with jigsaw precision into the hole in my heart. I’m happy when I’m home, when I can see the sun shining through the winter-bare ridge at dusk, when I can swat the blackflies come June. My thirties were essentially an extended early retirement; I spent those years—the 1990s—writing and wandering, and watching my daughter grow. Her first word was “birch,” which pleased me more than I can say; by the time she was fifteen she’d climbed all forty-six of the high peaks in her native Adirondacks, which made me at least as proud as her college admissions letter did a few years later.
Which is why it’s so odd that I’ve spent more nights away than home these past years. I’ve been to every continent since 2008, and once I hit four of them in six days. At 350.org we’ve organized, in the words of Outside magazine, “more rallies than Lenin and Gandhi and Martin Luther King combined.” It’s been the most satisfying work of my life, endlessly difficult and endlessly interesting. But asleep in some Days Inn or Courtyard by Marriott, I dreamed of the Champlain Valley, with the Adirondacks towering to the west and its growing web of organic dairies and community-supported agriculture (CSA) farms; I woke up to eat at the breakfast bar (non-Vermont non-maple syrup) and do rhetorical battle with retrograde congressmen. But I did that battle in the name of my place, remembering what it felt like. I can try to imagine “unborn generations” and the “suffering poor” and the other huge reasons to fight climate change, but I never have the slightest trouble conjuring up the tang of the first frosty morning in the Adirondack fall, the evening breeze that stirs as the sun drops below the ridge.
And, of course, if I knew my place, Kirk really knew it—felt its every change not only with his own senses but with the extended vision of the many million bees in his charge. Through them he knew each new development in the wider world; they were scouts, and he could read their dispatches with ease. I know no one more connected, which is why it has been a privilege just to follow him around.
So when I say activism didn’t come naturally to me, it’s not simply because I’m a writer; it’s because the need to stay close to home was very nearly biological. If I missed a week wandering the woods, it meant not seeing those flowers that year—the trillium would have to wait till next spring. But I’d turned fifty, and the “next springs” were now fewer than the springs I’d known. At night, on the road, distracted by worry, I’d say those names: Camel’s Hump, Breadloaf Mountain, Otter Creek. I’m a mediocre meditator, but the one mantra that could lull me to sleep in some lonely Hilton was the list of Lake Champlain’s many tributaries, north to south along the Vermont shore, then back down on the New York side. It hurt, physically, to leave; flying back into Burlington airport, winging past Whiteface and Giant Mountain, wheeling over Missisquoi Bay, calmed me down like nothing else.
That the two sides of my life were so at odds bothered me no end, far more than the jet fuel my travels burned. I couldn’t quite make them connect.
ARTICLES
Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.
Here are links to some of Bill's articles and to various interviews for magazines and radio programs. Note that the links take you off this site, to the source's own website.
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For each installment of Bill’s The Climate Crisis series in The New Yorker, click here.
June 3, 2020, The New Yorker, “If Drumpf Goes Even Lower, We’d Better Be Prepared”
Apr 22, 2020, The Guardian, “This Earth Day, we must stop the fossil fuel money pipeline”
Sept 17, 2019, The New Yorker, “Money is the Oxygen on Which The Fire of Global Warming Burns”
Sept 12, 2019, TIME Magazine, “Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different”
August 14, 2018, The New York Review of Books, “Seeing Red? Think Blue”
March 5, 2018, The Nation, “3 Strategies to Get to a Fossil-Free America”
June 26, 2017, The New Yorker, “The Race to Solar-Power Africa”
January 24, 2017, Rolling Stone, “The New Battle Plan for the Planet’s Climate Crisis”
November 30, 2016, The Nation, “How the Active Many Can Overcome the Ruthless Few”
August 15, 2016, Bill McKibben, The New Republic, “A World At War”
March 23, 2016, Bill McKibben, The Nation, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry”
October 20, 2015, Bill McKibben, The Nation, “Exxon Knew Everything There Was to Know About Climate Change by the Mid-1980s – and Denied It”
June 29, 2015, Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, “Power to the People”
May 21, 2014, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change“
Aug 18, 2013, Bill McKibben, TomDispatch, “Movements Without Leaders“
Mar 1, 2013, Bill McKibben, Orion Magazine, “A Moral Atmosphere”
July 19, 2012, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math“
Sept 28, 2011, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “The Keystone Pipeline Revolt: Why Mass Arrests are Just the Beginning“
SELECTED INTERVIEWS AND MEDIA
60 Minutes / CBS: What Will Be The New Normal After the Coronavirus Pandemic? May 2020.
Amanpour & Co / PBS: Bill McKibben Discusses Fossil Fuel Divestment. March 2020.
Bioneers: What We’ve Learned About Climate Change in the Last 30 Years. Nov 2019.
Democracy Now!: Youth Who Led Global Climate Strike Are Bringing a New “Spirit” to Climate Fight. Sept 2019.
NPR.org: Climate Change Is 'Greatest Challenge Humans Have Ever Faced,' Author Says. April 2019.
Amanpour & Co / CNN: Bill McKibben: We have wasted the last 30 years. April 2019.
CBS News: Bill McKibben on how extreme weather is shrinking the planet. Nov 2018.
350.org: Climate Teach-ins with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mustafa Ali, James Hansen, Katherine Hayhoe, and Bill McKibben. #1: Science. #2: Solutions. April 2017.
Plough Publishing: Bill McKibben on how to build a strong community. March 2015.
Feb 7, 2014, Bill Moyers: Bill McKibben to Obama: Say No to Big Oil
Feb 13, 2012, Colbert Report: The Keystone XL Oil Pipeline
Was "the invention of the idea of economic growth... almost as significant as the invention of fossil fuel power" in its impact, positive and negative?
ReplyDeleteYes! As I've stated previously, unlimited growth in tandem with limited resources is not only impossible, but also has an asymmetric effect on those that are a. not in possession of those resources, b. have their resources stripped from them (i.e. the global south) in the pursuit of facilitating growth, and c. face the repercussions of unyielding growth (i.e. sea level rise, increasing catastrophic weather events). The only people that benefit from the growth model are the ones pulling the levers, while everyone else suffers. This is only apparent in other parts of the world currently, but will become increasingly more apparent as time goes on and resources dwindle. There is no such thing as trickle down economics, and there is no such thing as a sustainable growth model.
By the end of the '70s 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain." What do you think the numbers are today?
I believe that more Americans are anti-growth, but I believe the majority are uncertain. We have become simultaneously disconnected and dependent on our supply chain, to the point of almost hopelessness. It is easier to turn a blind eye than to consider our economic models and its alternatives.