Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [46]
CHAPTER FOUR
Little Steps to Big Leaps
Fight It Head On
BILL McKIBBEN
I’ll tell you how I live my life right now. Right now I’m on the train from Berlin to Munich. Last night I gave a talk in Berlin, after one in the morning in Copenhagen. The day before that half a dozen meetings and speeches in London. In the next week I’ll be in Sweden and Switzerland and Turkey and Portugal, then on to India, the Maldives, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon. Etcetera. I live my life right now in constant motion, organizing 350.org, the first big grassroots global campaign to demand action on climate change.
As I write this, we’re four months out from our big day of global action in October 2009, designed to influence the Copenhagen conference in December of 2009. We don’t know yet if we’ll actually have any impact, but we do know the day itself will be a huge success—there will be mountain climbers high on every range, 350 scuba divers on the Great Barrier Reef, big demonstrations in cities across the globe. In Delhi thousands of people will form a giant “3,” and in London a “5,” and in Copenhagen a “0.” Why 350? Because in the last two years, since the melt of Arctic ice in the summer of 2007, our finest scientists have made it clear that’s the most important number in the world—it’s the most carbon we can have in the atmosphere and maintain a planet “similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” And since we’re already past it, at 389 and rising, that’s bad news.
So: I’ve got no very complicated or interesting answer to the excellent question this book raises. I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years, since I wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about climate change. I’ve spent time doing important things—trying to seriously pay attention to the natural world, which will never be as intact as it is now. Trying to work in my community in the mountains of the Northeast to build the kind of institutions and economies that could both slow down climate change and help us adapt to that which we can’t prevent. And most importantly, I’ve tried to raise a resilient and grounded daughter (the task where I’ve met with the most success, though I probably had nothing to do with it at all).
But—more and more—I’ve spent my time organizing. First a march across Vermont, which turned into what the newspapers called the largest climate change demonstration in U.S. history. Then, side by side with six college kids, a campaign that coordinated 1,400 simultaneous rallies across the U.S. Then, with Wendell Berry, I issued the call for the first mass civil disobedience on climate change in American history, a day coordinated by groups like Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network that actually persuaded Congress to shut down the coal-fired boilers that used to provide electricity for the capital. Now we’re working on a global scale on 350.org, with offices across the world, mostly run by incredibly dedicated and talented young people. In Delhi, in Beirut, in Johannesburg, in Quito, in Budapest.
I fear that I’ve left behind much of what used to define me. I was an essayist, a writer, a thinker. Much of that subtlety has been stripped away, perhaps for good. Cornered by this greatest of troubles, I couldn’t think of anything to do but try and fight it head on. So I did. And I’m glad I did—the rewards have been worth the cost, though the cost has been real. For the first time in twenty years I feel as if I’m doing exactly what I should be. I may wake up in