[SustainableTompkins] Bill McKibben: A Deeper Shade of Green

[Tony Del Plato]

Can we get "green" enough fast enough?
Tony Del Plato
Ithaca NY



Although the following article from the August issue of National Geographic
does not discuss genetic engineering, since many of the people on this GEAN
list are involved with "environmentalism," it will probably be of interest
to some of you.

Bill McKibben points out that while "environmentalism" has been somewhat
successful in dealing with many issues, we have "flunked" when it comes to
global warming. Those of you who have seen "An Inconvenient Truth" will
probably find this article to be of particular interest.

As Bill McKibben states, "We don't need a slightly rejiggered version of the
world we now inhabit; we need to start working on changes on the scale of
the problems we face."

Please share this article with others. Hopefully it will help serve as a
wake up call for increased "environmentalism" by concerned citizens --
before it is too late.

Warm regards,

Craig Winters
President
The Campaign
Tel: 425-771-4049
E-mail: mailto:craig at thecampaign.org
Web Site: http://www.thecampaign.org


Bill McKibben: A Deeper Shade of Green
http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0608/voices.html

Bill McKibben lives in a Vermont valley, where he puts his ideas for a new
cultural environmentalism into practice.

At times he can seem like a biblical prophet, lamenting how our human
failings are destroying the planet. Yet listen more carefully to Bill
McKibben-environmental essayist, activist, and author of the best seller The
End of Nature-and you'll hear a redeeming message that transforms the idea
of what "green" can mean.

By Bill McKibben

This is the year when we finally started to understand what we are in for.
Exactly 12 months ago, an MIT professor named Kerry Emanuel published a
paper in Nature showing that hurricanes had slowly but steadily been gaining
in strength and duration for a generation. It didn't attract widespread
attention for a few weeks-not until Katrina roared across the Gulf of Mexico
and rendered half a million people refugees. The scenario kept repeating:
Rita choking highways with fleeing Texans; Wilma setting an Atlantic Ocean
record for barometric lows; Zeta spinning on New Year's Day. Meanwhile,
other data kept pouring in from around the planet: Arctic sea ice melting
past an irrevocable tipping point; thawing permafrost in northeastern
Siberia creating so much methane that lakes didn't freeze even in the depths
of boreal winter; the NASA calculation that 2005 had been the warmest year
on record.

In January, a trinity of announcements sealed the mood. First, British
scientist James Lovelock, who invented the instrument that allowed us to
detect our eroding ozone layer, published an essay predicting that we'd
already added too much CO2 to the atmosphere and that runaway global warming
was inevitable. He predicted that billions will die this century. A few days
later came a less dramatic but equally alarming announcement. The steady and
long-serving NASA climatologist James Hansen defied federal attempts to gag
him and told reporters that new calculations about, among other things, the
instability of Greenland's ice shelf showed "we can't let it go on another
ten years like this." If we did? Over time, the buildup of CO2 emissions
would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet." Less
than ten years to reverse course. Not our kids' lifetimes, or our
grandkids'. Ours.

Finally, at month's end, even President Bush, as faithful a friend as the
fossil fuel industry has ever had, announced America was "addicted to oil."
Historians, I think, will look back on this as the time when denial finally
began to crumble. When we finally began to understand that the planet as
we've known it was at stake-and not from a possible scenario, like nuclear
war, but from the consumption of the coal and oil and gas that power most of
the actions of our lives. This is new. Humans have never faced a
civilization-scale challenge before. Whether we deal with it gracefully or
not depends, I believe, on what happens to that creed we call
environmentalism.

Environmentalism is mostly an American invention, one of the most powerful
ideas we've offered to the rest of the planet. It arose here for a simple
reason. We came to full consciousness while we were still in the process of
subduing the nation's forests and prairies. In much of Asia and Europe, the
woods were cut and the rivers tamed before the age of writers. Here, though,
Henry David Thoreau could see the line between man and nature on his daily
walks. George Perkins Marsh could watch what happened to the flow of streams
when New England forests were cut down. Aldo Leopold could look on as the
fierce green fire turned dull in the eyes of a gunned-down wolf.

None of these environmentalists, or the hundreds of thousands of other women
and men who believed passionately in such ideas, were able to slow the
economic juggernaut that rushed across this continent, however. Most didn't
think of that as their role; it didn't even cross their minds. They set up
small islands of park and wilderness for the tide to rush around. And they
worked, especially after Rachel Carson, to cure modernity's most toxic side
effects, making sure certain chemicals were banned and the Clean Air Act
passed. This movement has been remarkably effective. Even as our economy has
grown larger, smog has also abated. We can swim in most of our rivers again.
And our model has spread to the rest of the world. Other countries have
adopted their own clean air acts, built their own national parks. And
environmentalists can still win great victories: The Sierra Club and the
Wilderness Society and all the rest have managed so far, for instance, to
preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling.

But when it came time to deal with global warming, this kind of
environmentalism flunked. Despite 20 years of increasingly dire warnings,
American carbon emissions continue to grow; we won't even engage in the
Kyoto Protocol, the one international effort to bring carbon emissions under
some kind of control. A few western European nations are doing better, but
even they are having trouble meeting their reduction targets. And the
developing world is starting to flood the atmosphere with CO2 on an almost
American scale. From 1990 to 2004, China's carbon emissions increased by 67
percent, nearly all of it the result of coal.

We're now starting to realize this failure was almost inevitable.
Environmentalism's method of handling global warming is flawed.

The old paradigm works like this: We judge just about every issue by asking
the question, Will this make the economy larger? If the answer is yes, then
we embrace whatever is in question-globalization, factory farming, suburban
sprawl. In this paradigm, the job of environmentalism is to cure the worst
effects, and endless economic growth makes that job easier. If you're rich,
you can more easily afford the catalytic converter for the end of the
tailpipe that magically scrubs the sky above your city.

But it turns out that, above all else, endless economic growth is built on
the use of cheap fossil fuel. The industrial revolution began the day in
1712 that Thomas Newcomen figured out how to use a steam engine to pump
water out of a coal mine, so that it could be mined more cheaply and easily,
thus allowing more steam engines. Coal, oil, and natural gas were, and are,
miraculous-compact, easily transportable, crammed with Btu, and cheap. Dig a
hole in the ground, stick a pipe in the right place, and you get all the
energy you could ever need.

Precisely the same fuels that gave us our growth now threaten our
civilization. Burn a gallon of gas and you release five pounds of carbon
into the atmosphere. And as China demonstrates every day, the cheapest way
to spur growth is by burning more fossil fuel. Even Benjamin Friedman, the
Harvard economist who wrote a brilliant book last year defending the
morality of economic growth, conceded that carbon dioxide is the one major
environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication
of improvement as living standards rise.

Which means we might need a new idea. We need to stop asking, Will this make
the economy larger? Instead, we need to start asking, Will this pour more
carbon into the atmosphere? Some of the shift would be technological. If
carbon carried a real price, then we'd be building windmills far faster than
we are now. All cars would be hybrid cars, and all lightbulbs would be
compact fluorescent. Every new coal plant would be paying the steep price to
separate carbon from its exhaust stream and store it underground. All that
would help-but not enough to meet Hansen's ten-year prognostication, not
enough to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by the 70 percent required to
stabilize the climate at its current degree of disruption.

For that to happen, we'd need to change as dramatically as our lightbulbs.
We'd need to see ourselves differently-identity and desire would have to
shift. Not out of a sense of idealism or asceticism or nostalgia for the
'60s. Out of a sense of pure pragmatism.

For instance, we've gotten used to eating across great distances. Because
it's always summer somewhere, we've accustomed ourselves to a food system
that delivers us fresh produce 365 days a year. The energy cost is
incredible-growing and transporting a single calorie of iceberg lettuce from
California to the eastern U.S. takes 36 calories of energy. What would it
take to get us back to eating more locally, to accepting what the seasons
and smaller scale local farmers provide?

Or think about the houses we now build. They're enormous-more than double
the size they were in 1950, despite the fact that the number of people in
the average home continues to fall. Even a technologically efficient furnace
or air conditioner struggles to heat or cool such a giant space-and the
houses can only be built on big suburban lots, guaranteeing that their
occupants will be entirely car-dependent. What would it take to make us
consider smaller homes, closer to the center of town, where we could use the
bus or a bike for daily transportation?

It would require, I think, a movement that takes people's aspirations for
good and secure and durable lives seriously. That takes those desires more
seriously even than the consumer economy has taken them. We would need a
kind of cultural environmentalism that asks deeper questions than we're used
to asking.

How deep? Here's a data set just as interesting as the ongoing spike in
planetary temperatures-and almost as depressing. Since researchers started
trying to measure such things in the years after World War II, the
percentage of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" with their
lives has remained steady, even though the material standard of living has
nearly tripled in the same period. More stuff is not making us happier-but
we can't break out of the cycle that offers more stuff as our only real
goal.

What we really seem to want, according to the economists and psychologists
conducting such research, is more community. Standard economic theory has
long assured us that we're insatiable bundles of desires. That may be true,
but more and more it feels like our greatest wish is for more contact with
other people. We've built the most hyper-individualized society the world
has ever seen: According to some surveys, most Americans don't know their
next-door neighbors, which is a truly novel idea for primates. That's
contributed to the great success of our economy-each of us rises and falls
based on our own efforts, which is a great motivator. But it's also
contributed to that gathering sense of dissatisfaction, and to that cloud of
carbon dioxide. If everyone has to drive their own car everywhere (and the
biggest car possible, to maximize their own safety), then it's hard to
reduce emissions. If our idea of paradise remains a 4,000-square-foot house
on its own isolated lot, it's hard to imagine really rapid change.

But there are at least glimmers of another possible future. Consider food
again. Last winter I conducted an experiment: Could I get through the cold
months in my northern valley eating just the food grown in my county? As it
turned out, I didn't simply survive; I thrived. There were plenty of
potatoes and onions and beets and beef and cider and beer and wheat and
eggs, and just enough tomatoes canned in the heat of summer, to see me
through. I'm sure I saved lots of energy, though I can't calculate just how
much. What I can list, though, are the new friends I made, and they numbered
in the dozens. My food cost more in terms of time; it wasn't as convenient
to go to the farmers market as to the Shop 'n Save. But that cost, thought
of differently, was actually the biggest benefit of the whole experiment.

And I'm not alone. The number of farmers markets in the country has doubled
in the past decade. Sales are growing at least 10 percent annually, making
it among the fastest expanding parts of the food sector. A Saturday in
Madison, Wisconsin, finds nearly 18,000 people shopping in the streets
around the state capitol. In Burlington, Vermont's largest city, about 7
percent of the fresh food the populace eats is grown on just a hundred acres
of community-supported farmland near the town's old dump. Some farmers
markets cater to yuppies, and some are in housing projects; all bring people
closer together.

And you can do the same kind of rethinking about many other parts of daily
life, from transportation to housing to energy itself: Imagine a windmill at
the end of your cul-de-sac, powering the ten homes along the street. You
wouldn't be generating much carbon, and you would be generating lots of
companionship.

Environmentalism has often been a somewhat grim business. (There is, after
all, plenty to be grim about.) But a convivial environmentalism, one that
asks us to figure out what we really want out of life, offers profound
possibilities. Perhaps the most important of those possibilities is a new
link with communities of faith in this country. Though they don't always
live up to their ideals, churches and synagogues and mosques are among the
few institutions that can posit some idea for human existence other than
accumulation. They understand that it's not just, as Bill Clinton's campaign
asserted, "the economy, stupid." Their political help is crucial for making
necessary legislative change -maybe the best news of the year was that some
90 prominent evangelical leaders broke ranks with Pat Robertson and his ilk
to announce that they wanted to fight global warming, and fight it with
their particular set of tools. "This is God's world," they said, which is a
shocking idea for a culture that's come to think of everything as ours. It's
precisely this ability of religious leaders of all stripes to see
individuals as part of something larger than themselves that's so important.
And also their commitment to taking care of the needy, because of course
there are lots of people in the world who aren't rich. If we can't help them
figure out some path to dignity other than our hyper-individualism, the math
of global warming will never work.

We don't need to erase individualism; it is one of the glories of the
American character. But environmentalists desperately need to learn how to
celebrate community, too.

Environmentalism isn't dying. In fact, the need for it has never been
greater. But it has to transform itself into something so different that the
old name really won't apply. It has to be about a new kind of culture, not a
new kind of filter; it has to pay as much attention to preachers and
sociologists as it does to scientists; it has to care as much about the
carrot in the farmers market as it does about the caribou on the Arctic
tundra. That's what the printouts on atmospheric concentrations of carbon
dioxide tell us, and it's a message echoed by the researchers studying
happiness and satisfaction. We don't need a slightly rejiggered version of
the world we now inhabit; we need to start working on changes on the scale
of the problems we face.

Fear of what will happen unless we shift, desire for what might happen if we
do-together they're creating new openings for a more thorough shake-up than
any American thinker since Thoreau has envisioned. But ten years is not a
lot of time; we'd best get started.


-- 
"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something
rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
Seamus Heaney