Mr. McKibben goes to Madison

Bill McKibben, the prominent writer and environmentalist who founded 350.org, spoke at Green Day in Madison on April 17th. His presentation focused on the reasons he sees political activism as the primary route to effective change.

Mr. McKibben's first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 and was one of the first books to warn of the effects climate change could wreak on our world. Since then, he has written on many environmental subjects, and also started one of the largest environmental movements in history. McKibben is a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, and with six of his students he founded 350.org. This movement is based on the report by James Hansen (top climate expert and Iowa grad!) that 350 ppm is the upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere to maintain a livable world. The first day of action for 350.org was October 24, 2009, when 5,281 sites around the world held demonstrations supporting the 350 ppm goal. Millions of people participated, making it what some called the biggest display of political activism on any subject in history. Pictures from these demonstrations are on their website and are truly inspirational.

In his presentation last week, McKibben described the overwhelming response of this movement he'd started. McKibben pointed out that if you look at all the pictures from these demonstrations around the world, it completely refutes the label put on who environmentalists are. Many say that environmentalism is a white liberal elitist issue, a classist issue, and that it's a luxury once you have your needs met to live comfortably. On the contrary, these demonstrations were attended and organized in majority by the poor, young, non-white in the world. The most moving story of that day of action in October was that of an orphanage in Indonesia. The children and their caregivers collected plastic bottles all day to spell out 350. Along with a picture of them with their bottles, they included a message in broken English: "Even though no one caring about us, we caring about the Earth."

On feelings of defeat or cynicism: "Some people say that there's a good chance it might be too late, that we've already done too much damage to our Earth, and that the chance is high that any actions we take won't be big enough or fast enough. Well, being alive right now requires that we do everything in our power to lower the percentage chance that it's too late."

On his belief that individual lifestyle changes are not enough to make the huge changes necessary, and why political activism is key: "We're not gonna do this one lightbulb at a time, or even one country at a time. If we're gonna do this, it has to be one world at a time or not at all."

What an inspirational leader.