Listen to Bill Mckibben Discussing Literature, Climate Change and the 350 Movement.
In this recording scholar, author and activist Bill McKibben discusses literature, political organizing, environmental writing and activism, the art of anthologizing, Thoreau, Muir and Stegner, the wild, climate change, and the significance of 350.
Listen to Bill McKibben:
- Part one: Introduction
- Part two: Bill’s Remarks
- Part three: Questions & Answers
Bill McKibben On Amazon.com
Bill McKibben On Henry David Thoreau
He was so deep, so weird, so prescient, his antennae were so sensitive, that he was in many ways a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ahead of his time, and there are only now, I think, large chunks of Thoreau that we are coming to fully appreciate and understand and able to make sense of.
Bill McKibben On Ecology
The great science of the twentieth century, I think we’ll realize a hundred and fifty or two hundred years from now, was not nuclear physics and it wasn’t even computer science, it was ecology. The dawning understanding that everything was connected.
Bill McKibben On Rachel Carson
With Rachel Carson we begin to realize that there is no way to escape our irresponsibility. That there aren’t two realms, the industrial one and the wild one. That the poisons we are pouring into our industrial world are leaking into every corner of our planet.
Bill McKibben On Community
I have grown steadily towards a fascination with human communities as the way out of the trap into which we have fallen. And most recently, this book of mine, Deep Economy, that came out last year, and in a certain way represents the summation of a lot of my thinking on these questions. The idea that what’s happened in America, far more dangerously than the spread of particular chemicals or different environmental harms that we have subjected ourselves to, far more dangerous than that, for the last hundred years has been the pervasive, almost overwhelming spread of a kind of hyper-individualism that has separated us one from another so profoundly that we find it extraordinarily difficult to be what human beings were meant to be.
The Most Important Number in the World Right Now
The most important number in the world right now is 350, as in parts-per-million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before the Industrial Revolution there were 275 ppm carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Right now there are 385 ppm CO2 in our atmosphere, thanks to all the gas and oil and coal that we have burned in the last two hundred years. Because there are 385 ppm in the atmosphere a lot of bad things are happening. Seasons are shifting. Mosquitoes are spreading. Drought is becoming endlessly more of a problem in arid areas.
Maybe most dramatically, we saw last fall the rapid and almost unbelievable melt of artic ice in the course of weeks when areas the size of California were disappearing from the artic ice cap every week. We are taking that beautiful white shield across the top of our globe that reflects 80% of incoming solar radiation right back out to space, like a great mirror, and replacing it with blue water that absorbs 80% of incoming solar radiation. That just amps-up this whole reaction.
We have gone too far. We are way out of the safety zone. We have got to figure out very quickly how to cut back, how to stop producing much carbon dioxide at all on this planet so that the natural systems of the earth can cleanse some of it out of there and get us back to something that approaches a safe zone. That “safe zone” defined by our foremost climatologist Jim Hansen at NASA as being 350 ppm or less. That’s the challenge for our time on earth.
Bill McKibben On The Movement
The reason why this movement is so important, I think, and why we did Step-It-Up and why we are doing this 350 thing is because we need a mobilization in this country and around this world equivalent to the one that we had at the beginning of World War II that transformed in a matter of months and in the course of a couple of years our entire economy and put it on a different footing and faced up to one of the greatest problems that the world had ever faced. We’ve got to do something like that again with that same kind of focus. And it won’t be at all easy, and at the moment it’s not going to happen, and it won’t happen unless we build a movement that is strong enough to make it happen.
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