Americans Who Tell the Truth

Bill McKibben is a writer and avid environmentalist. Currently a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, he has written several books, and contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and Mother Jones. He is on the board of Grist Magazine, for which he also writes articles.

 

McKibben’s books vary in nature; however, it was his first book that established him as an environmental writer. The End of Nature, published in 1989, spoke to the issue of climate change. Originally serialized in The New Yorker, it was considered the first public-oriented alarm about climate change. With tragedies like Hurricane Katrina finally bringing global warming into sharper focus for everyone (not only scientists and environmentalists), his writings have grown even more important.  An active participant in the Methodist Church, he sees religion playing a vital role in protecting the future of Earth. A recent document called the Evangelical Climate Initiative led McKibben to write an article asserting that “even in the evangelical community, “right wing” and “Christian” are not synonymsxgiven that 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, and that we manage to emit 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide – well, the future of Christian environmentalism may have something significant to do with the future of the planet.”

 

Today, he examines the economy, the environment, and the overall happiness of the US. McKibben writes that formerly, it was accepted that growing the economy would make people wealthier, and therefore happier. Now, he says, “Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound – like climate change and peak oil – that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier.” McKibben’s latest book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, states the need “to move beyond growthxbegin pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energyx”. This idea builds on his 2003 book, Enough, which imagines genetic engineering, progress, and growth taken too far, and wonders whether it is not better to be fully human than unnaturally perfect.

 

In 2006, McKibben led a five-day walk across Vermont, demanding legislation to slow US carbon emissions. In early 2007, he founded stepitup2007.org. This unique idea called on people and local groups (including not-so-local groups such as the Sierra Club and the NWF), to organize their own rallies on April 14, 2007. The rallies ranged from a large group of people dressed in blue in Manhattan’s Battery Park, lining up approximately where the sea level would rise with continued glacial melting, to small groups viewing Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. All called for Congress to pass strict laws to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.