Nearly 20 years ago, Bill McKibben wrote the first major book on global warming, The End of Nature. He and the Step It Up team, a small group of young environmental activists based in Vermont, have recently completed the first-ever guidebook on how to organize and carry out political action on the issue of climate change, Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community. The book features a companion Web site at StepItUp2007.org, making the entire project sort of an update of Saul Alinsky for the Internet era.
On April 14, McKibben and Step It Up launched the largest environmental protest in a generation, which included underwater demonstrations in Key West and thousands wearing blue shirts in lower Manhattan to mark where sea levels might rise to. That day led not only to Fight Global Warming Now, but to a second round of nation-wide demonstrations, held this past Saturday, which featured people across the country rallying to support more green jobs, oppose big coal, and demand Congress take action on climate change.
TAP talked to McKibben about the new book, about Step It Up's success, and how he negotiates the worlds of journalism and activism.
Anabel Lee: What would the 80 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2050 entail on the part of Congress, and do you see a role for corporations in achieving this goal?
Bill McKibben: What Congress has to do is pass that enforceable goal. They have to set a cap on carbon and then begin ratcheting down that cap each year. This is, for instance, what the bill that [Sen. Bernie] Sanders, [Sen. Barbara] Boxer, and [Rep. Henry] Waxman have introduced would do. The effect would be to make carbon steadily more expensive. It would put the market to work on this problem. Many corporations have asked for just this kind of regulation. It puts them on a level playing field and sets them to work. So, yeah, they're going to be a part of this solution, there is no question. It's a very big problem, but it's happening so quickly that there's no use of wishing for a new economic system or a new human spirituality. We have to work with the institutions we've got.
Is it a goal of Step It Up to make global climate change a voting issue in 2008? And is there enough momentum to do so?
Yup, but it doesn't have enough momentum yet. That's why we need to build a movement. I don't think there's anybody running for president who's embraced it as the issue, and more or less, that's what it's going to have to be. Like it or not, for whoever is elected president, this will be their legacy issue. We have to have a big enough movement so they have no choice but to deal with it right from the start.
While writing this book, did you and the Step It Up team have in mind any movements of the past?
I think for us the civil rights movement is the great touchstone of American history. It's certainly one that I've studied and thought about an awful lot. I think that there are real similarities; I think that there are real differences, too. One of the differences is that nobody engaged in this work has to be as brave as the people who were in the civil rights movement. I don't foresee a moment where anyone is going to come burn down my house because of climate change activism or throw a bomb in my church. On the other hand, the civil rights movement had one great advantage, which was that its leaders knew that eventually they would win. They knew they would have to go through hell, but they knew they would emerge on the other side. Martin Luther King was confident. I mean, read his speech the night before he was killed. We don't have that same confidence because we don't have all the time in the world. We've got a narrow window to change how we do things, and if we don't change how we do things in that narrow window then it's going to snap shut on us, and there won't be much use having a movement.
In the book you talk about the importance of generating media coverage of the environmental movement. As a well-regarded journalist, arguably you yourself could draw more media attention to the movement by working from within the system rather than telling people how to stage protests that might or might not get them onto the news pages.
For a very long time in the nineties, with one or two other people, I was the only person constantly writing about global warming, writing op-ed pieces and magazine essays, and I still do that. I have a big piece about all this in the current issue of National Geographic. It's hard to do much better than that in terms of getting the word out. But, you know, I'm not fit to be the beat reporter on this stuff because I'm not objective. I actually know which side I want to win. I would really like to see global warming not happen, at least not any more than it has to. I can't be the beat guy, and so I do what I can in other ways.
I got the sense that your book is largely targeted at young people and college students. Do you think this demographic will be receptive to the grassroots go-out-and-rally type of model that was definitive of the sixties and seventies?
I think it's going to be the biggest student movement since the end of the war in Vietnam. I wasn't around for the sixties so I don't really know, but my sense is that there were a lot of people who were, along with trying to end the war, also trying to change everything there was about the culture, to create a new kind of human being, or whatever. I think our aims are somewhat more limited. Although, maybe not. In a sense if we're able to change the price of fossil fuel -- so much of the world as we know it now is a result of that cheap fossil fuel -- over time we really will shift society. In general, the young people I know who work on this are remarkably pragmatic, remarkably mature, remarkably sober in their aims; in fact, compared to the sixties, remarkably sober in general.
What specific lessons from the April campaign have you and the Step It Up team internalized and kept in mind as you organized the November 3 effort?
That's a good question, and I don't know how good a job we've done at that. Things have been moving quickly. We may have not been as analytical as we should have been. We keep coming up with good ideas and tossing them out there, probably in a less disciplined way than we should. Somebody a few weeks ago proposed that everybody should ink their finger green, sort of the way the Iraqis did with purple on the day of their election. So everybody is doing a lot of things like that, and it's really cool, but it's a little loose.
I think the main thing that we learned in April is that there are large numbers of Americans who are haunted by the idea of climate change but not quite sure how to go about doing anything about it on the scale that's required. We're giving people that opening, and that's really our goal. You know, in the end it may not work. I'm no complete optimist on this. I wrote a book called The End of Nature. So I don't know, but at the very least we're doing what we can.
Have you perceived any tangible change since April?
I think there's no question that the biggest change has been on Capitol Hill. Finally these guys are starting to get off the dime. They're beginning really to take it seriously, which doesn't mean that they're going to go do what they need to do any time soon. The other side is extremely strong, and they have people like Joe Lieberman who will do their bidding too often, who will water down the necessary bill. The conversation in D.C. is not quite where it should be, but it's getting closer.
