Since it’s Earth Day, I’ve asked five questions of environmental activist, thinker, and educator Bill McKibben. He has published 16 books, including the seminal End of Nature in 1989 and Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet in 2010, as well as hundreds of articles, all written with a piercing clarity in elegant, straightforward language. In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, known as the “alternative Nobel.” He won the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize in 2013.
With like-minded people he founded the grassroots 350.org to unite climate activists around the planet. He was a key participant in the successful fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and was arrested several times in Washington for civil disobedience in opposition to that project. He has inspired tens of thousands of people to join the effort of getting public institutions, including universities, churches, and municipalities, and even mutual funds to divest their stock portfolios of fossil fuel shares. A pragmatic visionary, McKibben is a guy who likes to start conversations. For more than two decades, he’s been having a long conversation with us about the environment and the economy. One key thing he taught me long ago is how inseparable these two are from one another.
METEOR BLADES: When you wrote The End of Nature in 1989, your first book on the environment, and the first popular book dealing with climate change, you expressed a lack of optimism about our chances of dealing with what was then the concern of just a few scientists and almost no activists. In the quarter-century since then, have you become more or less optimistic?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Less optimistic about the science—it's happening much faster, and with more weight, than we thought it would. The last six months have been devastating—temperatures setting every possible record, entire ecosystems like coral reefs starting to fundamentally collapse, trials for the poor and vulnerable like the emergence of Zika and the highest wind speeds ever recorded amidst devastating cyclones, and new research indicating that we can expect the collapse of ice sheets on a much faster time scale than we'd anticipated.
More optimistic about the rise of movements. Since the policy response of governments has been so feeble, we've had to build globe-spanning movements to try and check the fossil fuel industry. And we have. The fight over Keystone has turned into a thousand other fights—what one industry executive lamented as the “Keystone-ization” of every other project you can think of. And we're winning a surprising number of them. It's now people versus the biggest, richest industry on earth, full-on.
Read More