Bright Young Things

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.

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.