Midterm

  Me: Hello: My name is Stuart McLean and I would like to pose a quick interview question your way Mr. McKibben for in the future you may be a leading expert in this field. I am simply giving you a practice run interview to see how you do. Anyways, "Do you think the 'human game has begun to play itself out,' or do you believe we will avert the worst imaginable outcomes of climate change in the century ahead? If so, how? If not, why not?"

Bill McKibben:

"What I’m calling the human game is unimaginably deep, complex, and beautiful. It is also endangered. Indeed, it is beginning to falter even now." (11) It is engrained in our DNA to take what we think is ours and multiply to continue our way of life. If we take Darwin's thinking into action we may pose the theory forward that we were all once amoebas trying only to survive and grow our selves by eating and expanding outwards. This obviously leads to humanity and it has not since ceased with people trying so desperately to absorb, absorb and absorb some more. With humanity growing we need leaders and politics to set codes of conducts straight but people choose to either follow the wrong people or outcast themselves into a lifestyle that may be even more dangerous to themselves and people around them in their communities. We do not often think about our past to determine our future in a level headed mindset. "In part, that’s because the past is so short. We are the first acutely self-conscious species, so wrapped up in our own story that we rarely stop to remember how short that story really is. Day to day, we forget that if the billions of years of life on Earth were scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our settled civilizations began about a fifth of a second ago."(14)

"This “human game” I’ve been describing differs from most games we play in that there’s no obvious end. If you’re a biologist, you might contend that the goal is to ensure the widest possible spread of your genes; if you’re a theologian, the target might be heaven. Economists believe we keep score via what they call “maximizing utility”; poets and jazz musicians fix on the sublime. I’ve said before that I think there are better and worse ways to play this game—it’s most stylish and satisfying when more people find ways to live with more dignity—but I think the game’s only real goal is to continue itself. It’s the game that never ends, which is why its meaning is elusive."(150)

Me: So you are saying that since we are in spite of everything just trying to survive, but with this survival comes the somewhat destruction and possible end of our own survival? We are our own demise?

Bill McKibben: Yes, We have the ability to undo everything we have created.  There are so many multitudes of ways that this may happen but closer than most would seem to admit would "of course be is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges, and certainly the one about which we’ve done the least. It may not be quite game-ending, but it seems set, at the very least, to utterly change the board on which the game is played, and in more profound ways than almost anyone now imagines. The habitable planet has literally begun to shrink, a novel development that will be the great story of our century."(21-22)

Me: Thank you for your time and your profound words!

McKibben: Absolutely!

*Firm Handshake*