Bill McKibben sends dispatches from a global-warming march 2

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, published in 1989, the first book for a general audience on climate change. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, his forthcoming book is titled Deep Economy. He's participating in a five-day walk calling for action to fight global warming -- From the Road Less Traveled: Vermonters Walking Toward a Clean Energy Future.

Wednesday, 30 Aug 2006

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Why would anyone spend their Labor Day weekend wandering the shoulder of a highway? It's possible no one will -- but if they do, it may signal the next wave in the global-warming fight. And not a moment too soon.

By now, after almost 20 years, there's an amazing array of people working on global warming. The environmental movement has largely become the climate-change movement (the leaders of its major organizations, the Green Group, chose the issue as a top priority at least through 2008). There are committed engineers building the next generation of windmills, and economists figuring out a thousand schemes for trading carbon emissions, and pollsters running focus groups, and documentarians trying to follow up on Al Gore's success, and vice presidents for campus facilities installing new light bulbs in every dorm, and on and on and on.

On the long road to a cooler planet.

Photo: iStockphoto

What there haven't been, oddly, are any people in the streets. That's about to change. The end of this summer will see the first few mass demonstrations in U.S. history about climate change. The Chesapeake Climate Action Network gathered supporters outside the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over the weekend, for instance, to demand that its bureaucrats own up to the link between climate change and hurricanes.

Later this week, meanwhile, a large group of us will step off from the spine of the Green Mountains in central Vermont for a five-day march into the state's major city, Burlington. We'll be walking the main roads on the west side of the state, rallying on town greens in the evening, holding a special church service on Sunday, and then, on Labor Day afternoon on the banks of Lake Champlain, demanding that our Senate and House candidates pledge to support not some lukewarm McCain-Lieberman silliness, but instead the relatively stiff proposals that our retiring independent senator, Jim Jeffords, recently introduced in the Senate.

Those proposals call for a number of things, including 20 percent renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent carbon reductions by 2050 -- not deep or fast enough to solve the problem, but perhaps sufficient to really spur both technological and social change. The hope (against hope) is that once the ball starts rolling, it will go faster than we now imagine, fast enough to catch up with the momentum of the warming itself.

But we're not going to take those kinds of big steps unless and until our political leaders perceive that their constituents really want something new to happen. The problem with fighting global warming is that it's almost never the absolute No. 1 problem on anyone's list, the single most timely issue that will really bring people out to protest. For people who care about peace and human rights, there's always something like the situation in Darfur or in Lebanon -- an immediate crisis demanding immediate reaction. Never mind that over the long run it's painfully clear that global warming will produce unprecedented waves of refugees and hence unprecedented levels of conflict. For people moved by social-justice issues, the poverty of the moment motivates more than the hunger that's clearly coming as we unhinge the operation of the climate, inundate the coastal plants, and hence make marginal lives twice as shaky as before. Even for environmentalists, it's easier to understand in your gut, and hence take real action to prevent, the threat posed by chainsaws to a grove of redwoods or by a new smokestack to the air quality of your neighborhood.

And so climate change has increasingly been left to the technocrats, to the voices of reason. The problem is, they're losing. They haven't been able to outshout the voices of the special interests, which is why there's been no action on Capitol Hill, nothing at all.

Which in turn is why the rest of us need to speak up. Still rational (we have, after all, mountains of science on our side) but not so reasonable. Not willing to understand why nothing much can be done; not willing to seek the mildest possible compromises; above all, not willing to wait. We can speak the calm language of parts per million and insulation R-value and tradeable permit -- but we can also speak the charged language of our children's future and our planet's glory and our Creator's commandments.

If you live anywhere near Vermont, we hope you can join us for some part of our journey. And if you don't, we hope even more fervently that you'll start something similar in your neighborhood. Because the time has come.

The Road Less Traveled

Bill McKibben (in blue shirt) leads fellow Vermonters in calling for action on climate change.

Photos: Jon Orlando/ Greenpeace

 
Ripton, Vt., is the definition of New England mountain hamlet: stuck along the spine of the Green Mountains, a tiny burg with a general store and a town hall and a white church. And, this morning, a line of 300 people marching in the bright sunshine, a snaking line alongside the Middlebury River as it descends to the Champlain Valley below.

It's the opposite in every way of Sacramento, where the announcement just came that California would embark on its landmark effort to control carbon dioxide. But today they were linked, the two most important places in America in the fight against global warming, each illustrating both the potential for progress and the daunting obstacles ahead.

If you think about it, of course, neither one should be the place where we're making global-warming progress. The legislating should be done in Washington, and in New York at the United Nations -- climate change is the quintessential global problem. But because of the Beltway roadblock that's prevented progress for 15 years now, the pressure to deal with the planet's first civilization-scale challenge has built up and begun to find new and unexpected outlets. The action has shifted to city halls and state capitols, with the announcement of California's carbon deal the apex of this strategy.

But even California can't really do it alone. The state's attempts to raise automobile mileage are in court, under challenge from the federal government. The new law imposing carbon caps will face constant pressure because the state lacks the ability to really change the price of energy, which is the sine qua non for rapid progress. So at the same time, we need to figure out how finally to remove the (bipartisan) logjam that has blocked action in the nation's capitol.

Hence our walk. For five days we're trekking to Burlington, Vermont's biggest city, building momentum as we go until, on Labor Day afternoon, we assemble all the state's candidates for federal office and demand that they endorse strong action -- the legislation introduced earlier this year by our retiring senator, Jim Jeffords (I), which calls for an 85 percent reduction in CO2 by 2050.

One of the things we've discovered along the way is how eager people are to speak out on this question. It's just that they've never been given much of a chance -- talk about climate change has been largely confined to lecture halls, symposia, hearing rooms. Somehow the first civilization-scale challenge the planet has faced has yet to produce a movement; in fact, it's arguable that our band of strong-legged Vermonters setting out in the cool of the morning was one of the largest demonstrations about climate change yet held in this country.

One of its best features was the speed with which a collection of diverse groups put it together. Many were local -- the Vermont Natural Resources Council, VPIRG. But some of the big boys helped too, especially Greenpeace, which dispatched a crew of competent-beyond-belief traffic experts and sound-system wranglers. The cooperation was easy and deep, and institutional ego was almost nonexistent. It makes me think that just like the people who showed up to walk, an awful lot of organizers are eager for the chance to finally get some traction with this cause.

Which leaves the question: why start a march against global warming in an insignificant mountain town? Because this is where Robert Frost spent most of the summers of his life, and wrote many of his greatest poems. John Elder, a Frost scholar and a maple-syrup maker whose forest is just a few towns away, launched the march by reading Frost's most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," with its invocation of the less-traveled path. And then we set off on that path, into a future that's still ours to make. The news from either end of the country today is that we're actually, really, finally trying.

Thursday, 31 Aug 2006

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.

Friday, 1 Sep 2006

VERGENNES, Vt.

Thirteen miles across the backroads today, with one near collision with a speeding milk truck. But walking across Vermont has plenty of consolations.

A setting that defines bucolic, for one thing. Early in the morning, leaving the town of Middlebury, our line of climate marchers passed the farm of a horse breeder specializing in dark brown Morgans. Forty stood in the field solemnly watching, and then turned and galloped as one across the field for half a mile, with the Green Mountains arrayed as a backdrop. Think "beer commercial," then think "real."

Good food, too. We pulled into Bound Brook farm outside Vergennes as the sun was setting, and pitched our tents in the pasture. Eric and Erica Anders were baking pizza and bread from their wheat harvest in a new cob oven out by the barn; when they finished feeding us, they started playing lilting bluegrass, a concert that lasted well into the night.

The biggest local pleasure, however, was seeing Middlebury College students begin to arrive back in the state, catching up with our walk on bikes or via the local bus service. College doesn't begin for a week, but many had headed up early to join our march -- which in a sense was inspired by their own increasing activism.

Those who despair that today's college students aren't involved, spend their time with video games, name your geezer complaint, should visit Middlebury for a little while. In the last four years, students at the rural college have organized the campus like no other in the country. A collective called the Sunday Night Group meets each ... Sunday night, often with a hundred or more students on hand to plan climate-change activism. They've helped change the campus (turned the thermostats down in winter, persuaded the administration to rethink its heating plant), the town (ran light-bulb exchanges that have passed out tens of thousands of CFL bulbs), the state (an annual bike to Montpelier has become one of the year's big lobbying events), even the world (they sent busloads up to Montreal for last year's international climate-change negotiations, by far the largest and loudest American delegation).

And they've done it all in exemplary fashion -- dedicated and firm in their convictions, but also open to dialogue, willing to work with authority instead of simply challenge it. The college president, Ron Liebowitz, greeted marchers one day last week by calling the Sunday Night Group one of the college's most important highlights; as we walked yesterday, the provost of one of Vermont's state colleges was talking with the Middlebury students, seeing how his campus could import some of their energy.

What's most interesting is how many of these kids are in it for the long haul. I walked yesterday with May Boeve and Claire Polfus, just returned from summer in Pennsylvania organizing the "Climate in the House" campaign to pressure candidates in congressional races. Boeve, who will graduate soon, was describing plans to move out West and organize in the coal states along the Rocky Mountains. I was writing yesterday from the office of another recent graduate, hard at work producing a carbon-offset credit card. And on and on. You can see some of their future possibilities in the Greenpeace activists helping make this march work -- they're a few years older, but no more cynical. And you can see it too in many of the 50-, 60-, 70-somethings who've joined in along the way, people who remember the last real burst of activism in this country (and remember it with the affection it deserves, not the contempt that "the '60s" now seem to inspire in so many memories).

At any rate, when your feet are tired and you're a little sad about the state of the world, it's incredibly reassuring for all of us with graying hair to realize someone younger is there to carry on the joyful burden of feeling the planet's sweetness and guarding it with the intelligence and compassion it requires.

Bright Young Things

Sunday, 3 Sep 2006

SHELBURNE, Vt.

We're camped tonight in a broad field at Shelburne Farms, eight miles from our goal in Burlington, after 24 hours of such constant activity that it's hard to remember exactly what's happened. The main impression: incredible support.

We've been marching up Route 7, western Vermont's main thoroughfare, and according to our fairly scientific survey, 80 percent of Vermonters will wave and honk when they see a long line of people marching against global warming. Five percent will wave and honk so wildly that their Priuses almost veer off the road, wiping out said march. Two percent of people apparently think global warming should be accelerated, and 13 percent are looking for a new station on the radio dial.

Marchers at church.

Photo: Jon Orlando/ Greenpeace

Saturday night, after a long haul, we pulled into a senior center in the town of Charlotte, to be greeted with a big spread of food and a not-at-all-senior rock-and-roll band. After a night camped by the lake (a swim! with biodegradable soap!), we reassembled the next morning at the Charlotte Congregational Church for a morning service devoted to caring for Creation. People from around the region crowded in, spilling out onto the front steps. The hardworking deacons ran out of Communion wine. But the hymn-singing was intense; we left with a lilt in our step.

By dusk, we'd reached this enormous farmstead, now a nonprofit center for environmental education. We gathered in what once had been the horse-breeding barn -- the largest single-span wooden structure in the world -- for hours of music and talk. We heard from the Buddhist environmentalist Stephanie Kaza, the enlightened entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation, the folk-singing preacher Fred Small, and, perhaps best of all, the wailing jazz clarinet of Bud Leeds, sounding a pure, clear note in the enormous space.

And tomorrow we're on to the final stop -- the gathering of politicians on the lakefront in Burlington, where we hope to win agreement from all our candidates to make the Jeffords-Waxman climate-change legislation a strong priority if they're elected. We have no real idea what's going to happen: Will they sign our pledge or won't they? Will they even show up?

But in some sense it feels like we've already succeeded. This is no longer a second-tier issue in Vermont politics; it's now firmly on the agenda. All it took was a few hundred blisters.

Honk If You Care About the Climate

Monday, 4 Sep 2006

BURLINGTON, Vt.

No matter what any organizer -- even a pretend one like me -- says, the greatest fear is always numbers. What if you call a rally and no one comes?

Today, by early in the morning, it was clear that wasn't going to be a problem. By the time we headed out of Shelburne Farms toward Burlington, our line numbered over 500. Over the next 10 miles we added hundreds more, the line stretching half a mile along the shoulder of the highway as we snaked past the car dealerships and burger joints on the southern edge of the state's largest city. When we finally got to the rally site on the Lake Champlain waterfront, there were more than a thousand people protesting global warming -- the largest political rally in the state in recent memory, and perhaps the largest demonstration against climate change yet in the country.

And the numbers mattered. We weren't sure till the last minute exactly which politicians would appear, but as word spread over the five days of the march that it was a powerful success, the promises from the various camps grew firmer and firmer. By the time we got to the rally, all the federal candidates were waiting, and one by one they took the stage.

But not, crucially, until we explained the terms of the deal. We didn't want their vague expressions of concern and promises of action -- we wanted their signatures on the giant global-warming pledge we'd written based on the Jeffords-Waxman legislation. As each came on stage for their allotted three minutes, Schuyler Klein -- the youngest of the walkers who had managed the whole 50 miles -- handed them a giant Sharpie and asked them to sign. Bernie Sanders -- our sitting congressional representative, now running for Senate -- was first; no surprise that he signed in a flowing scrawl and then brought the walkers to their tired feet by promising to reintroduce the Jeffords bill on his first day as a senator. But he was followed by the Republican candidate, Rich Tarrant, a gazillionaire who's been running such a negative campaign that one local columnist has started calling him Tarrantula. He signed, he pledged his fealty, and the crowd applauded with real warmth.

The congressional candidates came next. Again, Peter Welch was no great surprise. The Democratic candidate has championed renewable-energy legislation as president of the state Senate; he's made global warming a centerpiece of his campaign. Martha Rainville, his GOP opponent, came next. Two months ago, early in her campaign, she'd said it wasn't clear if humans were even causing global warming and called for more research; today, driven by the obvious passion in the state, she marched right over, grabbed the pen, and inked her signature.

With that, all the candidates for the state's federal offices had signed on to a plan for halting global warming far more radical than anything else proposed in Congress. We had managed to almost literally raise the bar in Vermont politics to the point where anyone wishing to be taken seriously needs to champion an 85 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the rapid phase-in of 40-mile-per-gallon cars, and a national plan to get 20 percent of our power from renewables by 2020. In other words, the same kind of plan that the European nations have endorsed. More to the point, we'd demonstrated that at least for Vermont voters this was not a second- or third-tier issue -- it was as crucial to getting elected as your position on jobs or the economy or all the things the political pros always call the real issues.

After that, there was nothing but singing and dancing -- Anais Mitchell, a local folksinger with a national following, led everyone in "This Land is Your Land," and John Elder, writer and professor, finished off with the same Frost poem that had launched the march, "The Road Not Taken."

And there were questions, too. Was this success unique to Vermont, or could it be replicated elsewhere? Already people from other states were talking about marches of their own in the coming year. My sense, from helping to organize this one, is that people are simply waiting for someone to give them an opportunity to demonstrate their despair and their hope. I know for me the sheer act of getting out and walking was cathartic -- and to see how many others came along was sheer bliss.

In almost 20 years of working on global warming, I've never had a day when I felt as hopeful.

Hope and Glory

• Comments