Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, is the author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont and one of the Sojourners contributing editors.
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What Next for the Occupiers?
Group meditation in Zuccotti Park, October 2011. Photo by Cathleen Falsani for Sojourners.
One of the highlights of the fall for me was undertaking a kind of Occupy Tourism. I was spending most of my time on the move, working to build the broad coalition that eventually won at least a temporary victory against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta. In almost every city I visited, I tried to stop by the local encampment, in part because Occupiers were among our most reliable allies, and in part because it was so much fun.
I’ve gotten to speak through the human microphone in lower Manhattan and tour the D.C. campsite just a few blocks from the White House. But I’ve also gotten to sign the copies of my books in the library tent at Occupy Boston (a quiet tent, staffed by honest-to-God librarians from Boston Public Library, with everything arranged by subject). I even made it to foreign occupations—standing beneath a giant stone lion in the grand Vancouver encampment. Happiest occupation goes to San Luis Obispo, California, where I got a hug from a fellow with a huge “Free Hugs” sign. The most chic, not surprising, was Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they arranged not only a campfire for my talk, but a rising full moon in the desert sky.
Drawing a Line in the (Tar) Sand
This may be the largest use of civil disobedience yet around global warming.
The New Ugliest Word
Fracking is just one more way to keep from coming to terms with our addiction to fossil fuel.
The Ugliest Word in the English Language: Fracking
Climate Change: Just the Facts
The fossil fuel industry is the main impediment to real change. Why? Because they are making money. Exxon made more money in 2009 than any company in the history of money.
The Planet Cries Out
We need to clear the polluted political air before we'll have a real chance to clear the actual atmosphere.
Time to Take It to the Streets
At this point the mechanisms are pretty clear: Burn fossil fuel and wreck the planet.
Nonviolent civil disobedience has been a less effective tactic in this country in the past few decades for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is probably that our woes are more complicated than in an earlier age. If there’s an exception to this rule, it's the issue I've spent much of my life working on: climate change.
True, climate change is rooted in complex science, but at this point the mechanisms are pretty clear: Burn fossil fuel and wreck the planet. It carries a strong moral edge: The people who burn the least suffer the most. And there are a series of relatively obvious villains: oil and coal barons, who not only profit from the carbon but use their proceeds to foul the debate with endless propaganda.
Since campaigners have in many cases changed their own lives, and tried for two decades the obvious tactics, such as legislative advocacy, without result, maybe the time has come to heighten the stakes, with mass action at the most obvious sites, from coal-fired power plants to corporate headquarters and congressional offices. Indeed, brave people have already begun: More than 100 were arrested, for instance, in a recent D.C. protest about mountaintop removal coal mining.
But using this tactic effectively will require some other changes.
A Problem of Biblical Proportions
The summer's weather can safely be described as biblical, in the sense that newspaper writers generally use the word -- that is, loud, scary, and dangerous.
Time for Some Angry Work
Time for Some Angry Work
Water, Water, Everywhere
If there is one commodity we should think about collectively, it's water.
If there is one commodity we should think about collectively, it's water.
Copenhagen's 'Hail Mary'
A Difference that Matters
I am writing these words on the train from Zurich to Geneva, looking up from my keyboard to see snowcapped mountains hanging over the lake.
Video: Bill McKibben on The Colbert Report
The Price of Victory
Winning can be nearly as hard as losing. Everything changed for the American environmental movement with Barack Obama’s victory.
The Leadership Gap on Global Warming
Here's the word from the physical world: On Sept. 10, scientists studying satellite images of the Arctic reported that sea ice covered 4.32 million square kilometers of the north. The old record, set two years before: 5.34 million square kilometers. Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver, said, "It's amazing. It's simply [...]
Stepping It Up to Save the Earth
The fight against global warming will require a movement full of fire and prayer. That movement has begun...