The Road Less Traveled

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.

 
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.