Bill McKibben describes himself as a “professional bummer-outer of people” but he’s better known for his books, journalism, and coordinating 350.org. The Boston Globe has said that he is “probably the nation’s [USA] leading Environmentalist.”
Last Thursday he spoke at the Desautels Business Conference on Sustainability, discussing how climate change is taking shape four years after An Inconvenient Truth.
“2010 was really the year that the world as a whole could start understanding what climate change really feels like,” said McKibben. The level of ice is lower than ever, air holds 4.5% more water vapor than before, and the world’s oceans have become steadily more acidic. “Just think how strained that system will become, in fact how strained it already is… changing the climate is the biggest thing humans have done, [and] it’s already beginning to pinch.”
The problem, said McKibben, is our reliance on fuel. We let fuel do our work for us, which explains why, in the US, there are twice as many prisoners than farmers: through cheap oil, farming is no longer a labour-intensive enterprise. McKibben describes fuel as a thing from the past, and to mitigate climate change we will have to use other forms of energy. “We’re going to have to move away from the 18th century, into the 21st.”
McKibben became a climate activist when he realized that, even though the scientific evidence was there, there was no environmental movement, and climate change was happening faster than first predicted: “Our old targets are obsolete. What happens in 2050 is a lot less important than what happens in 2020 … we [realized that] we were never going to prevent global warming, we had already moved beyond that.”
Even after 350.org initiated “the most widspread day of political action in the planet’s history,” it was clear to McKibben that we’re still losing.
The solution, at least in the US, is that we should radically change our perception of who we are and the things we need: “resilience, security, and connection… what is making us less happy is an increasing lack of connectedness and community.” McKibben blames the American drive for consuming goods and real estate. “What Americans have worked on for the last decades is building big houses and spending more money on living farther away from each other.” He describes these houses as “starter castles for entry-level monarchs.”
The real change we need to make, said McKibben, will have to be in our social fabric. “Building a movement allows us to build solidarity between humans.” Such a movement could change the world we live in. “I think we can take this ecologic and economic difficulty that we’re in to imagine a new future.”
Aaron Vansintjan
Photo source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Bill_McKibben_at_RIT-3.jpg