The American author and activist, Bill McKibben has kindly agreed to answer a few questions from All Our Yesterdays. His 1989 book The End of Nature – about the implications of global warming – was groundbreaking, and whose activism since has included 350.org and now Third Act.
1. According to Wikipedia (!) you were born in Palo Alto and then moved to Lexington Massachusetts. There’s a question I ask almost everyone – according to some intriguing research, one thing that applies to many strong advocates of environmental action is that they spent a lot of time in “nature” in unstructured play before the age of 11. Does that apply to you?
To some degree. My father had grown up out west and was a devoted hiker, and we spent a couple of weeks each summer on vacation somewhere fairly wild. But I was a product of suburbia, and my real immersion in the natural world came later, as a young adult, when I moved to a remote part of the Adirondack mountains [You can read more about McKibben’s upbringing in his recent memoir – the Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon]
2. Can you remember when and how you first heard about the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? (Presumably it was in the late 1970s? So I am assuming things like Gus Speth at the Carter-era Council on Environmental Quality, or Worldwatch Institute or so on).
It was in the mid-1980s–but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that really no one had heard much about it outside of closed scientific circles until Hansen’s 1988 testimony. That’s really when the clock started ticking
3. The “End of Nature” was one of the first books to really grapple with what carbon dioxide build-up would mean for societies and people relationships with nature, beyond being an explanation of the science. When was the last time you re-read it, and what did you think?
I’ve reread pieces of it from time to time, most recently this year while writing Here Comes the Sun, which is a kind of bookend to The End of Nature. It seems to me to still be strong–obviously the work of a young man, but there’s not much I’d change. I wish I’d been wrong.
4. Your next book The Age of Missing Information tried to help people understand what I call the datasmog. That datasmog seems to have gotten much worse. You have to be 40, really, to have any memory of the world before the Internet, and 25 to remember the world before smart phones. Does that have implications for how younger people relate to the natural world, to political processes? What do older activists not understand about this change, in your opinion?
I think it’s pretty clear the world is mostly mediated now, for most people most of the time. We just stare down at the thing in our palms. And if it was providing us with intelligence and wisdom that would be one thing, but it clearly mostly is not
5. All Our Yesterdays is devoted to getting people to realise just how long the scientists have been warning and the media too. What lessons do you think have been unlearned or under-learned from the 36 years since your first piece on the topic, in December 1988.
That while it’s important to win the argument, you also have to win the fight–which is about money and power, not reason and data and evidence
6. Pivoting to “now” – there were successful campaigns to stop specific disastrous pipelines and so on, and during the Biden administration there was, along with a lot that was terrible and inadequate, some things that might give a squinting optimist cause for hope (Climate Corps.)
Well, now what?!
I keep track as best I can on my free newsletter, The Crucial Years. We’re in the midst of two great trends–the very rapid warming of the earth, and the very rapid fall in the price of clean energy. It’s hard to know which will prove stronger; we need to do all we can to make the latter force as powerful as it can be, even amidst the oil-soaked Trump presidency
7. Anything else you’d like to say. (plugs for new books, projects, groups, general thoughts)
Please save September 20 and 21 on your calendars. We’re calling that weekend SunDay and will soon announce big plans to make it a festive moment of celebration of the possibility for running the earth in far more benign ways.
[When more information about that weekend are available, AOY will add a link, and post]
Here’s something from McKibben’s
.
So in about six weeks we’re going to formally announce plans for a big global day of action—we’re calling it Sun Day. It will happen on the weekend of the autumnal equinox, September 20 and 21. It will be a celebration of the fact that we can now run this world without fossil fuels: imagine EV and e-bike parades, green lights in the window of every solar-powered home, big concerts and rallies, joyful ceremonies as new solar farms and wind turbines go on line. It’s going to happen around the world. It’s going to demand justice—above all, that we figure out how to finance this revolution around the world, so the people who need it most can take full part. And it’s going to be beautiful.
This may not look, at first glance, like ‘resistance’ or ‘opposition.’ But in fact this is precisely what the fossil fuel industry fears most: the truth that their product isn’t needed. That it’s dirty, that it’s expensive, and that there’s a better way—Big Oil’s executives know that at the cellular level, which is precisely why they spent so much money electing Trump. Solar panels are to the fossil fuel industry what water was to the Wicked Witch.
Help!
Do you have ideas (and ideally contacts) for people AOY should interview? There’s absolutely nothing automatically wrong with white middle-aged men (speaking as one), but it turns out they are only one sliver of a vibrant broad climate movement. So please, if you know people from all the other demographics who might respond positively to an interview request, let me know.