Interview
Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He leads 350.org’s campaign to tackle climate change.In an interview with Open Citizenship, he speaks frankly about the urgency required to tackle climate change, and what 350.org is doing to make the public more aware of the Earth’s ecological limits.
350’s work concentrates on gaining international recognition for 350 ppm as the maximum allowable limit of greenhouse gas concentration. In other words, your work is primarily on fighting climate change. How does your work relate to sustainability?
Well, we think a stable climate is the sine qua non of sustainability – and that the steps we need to take to get there, particularly building out a distributed, renewable energy grid, will help build a more economically and socially sustainable society as well.
A major feature of 350’s work is that it is so international. What have you found to be the particular character of the movement in Europe compared to other regions? What are major opportunities and challenges for Europe in particular?
European governments have tended to take this problem a little more seriously, so people tend to have some faith in them on the issue. That’s not true in the rest of the world, where governments have done even less.
Just like here in the US, one of the main challenges in Europe is in overcoming the influence and power of the fossil fuel industry and the stranglehold that it has on our political systems.
Sustainability is sometimes conceived as a way of thinking about and responding to crises. Do you think this is correct? Is it a way to address the crises facing Europe: climate change, the ongoing economic crisis and an increasing democratic deficit at the European level?
Our economic and political systems exist inside the boundaries of our natural system; if it’s swinging wildly out of control then it puts huge stress on those economic and political systems. I think bigness is probably the enemy in a lot of ways, including environmentally; it’s useful to start building down these systems that are “too big to fail”, meaning not just finance but also energy and agriculture.
350.org has a relatively small staff compared to the scope of the work you do. To an outsider, it appears that a lot of your work is targeted on building local networks of climate advocates and supporting loosely coordinated grassroots local movements. What is the strategy behind this? What sorts of effects have you seen on participants?
We’re less an organisation than a series of campaigns, open to all. This kind of open source organising is possible given new technology, and one of its blessings is it leads to a constant new supply of leaders. We no longer have a world, I think, where particular great figures, in the Dr. King or Nelson Mandela tradition, will be as important as those towering giants were.
You promote the idea of divestment – what is it and how are you getting people involved?
It’s one front in this battle. Universities, local governments, churches can help with the process of delegitimising the fossil fuel industry by refusing to participate in it economically. The campaign demands that these institutions freeze new investments in fossil fuel companies and over five years phase out existing investments – whether in stocks/shares, bonds or funds – that support fossil fuel companies.
What is the role of individual citizens and groups like 350 in a sustainability transition?
We help push and prod the system till hopefully at some point it actually begins to respond (and hopefully inside the narrow time limit physics allows us). One of the ways that people can do this is through actively organising in their own communities. Efforts such as the fossil free divestment campaign provide simple easily replicable tactics that make such participation accessible and effective.
You have made use of mass media, for example by announcing major initiatives to the public through magazines like Rolling Stone and sites like Grist, in contrast to many other climate advocates who stick to academic or specialty journals. What sort of language have you found most effective in winning people to your cause? How should sustainability advocates get the word out?
I have no special trick to recommend here. We’ve always found that just straight-up telling the truth seems to work – I mean, we named our group after a scientific data point, and a gloomy one at that.
What challenges does the climate movement in Europe face? Does it work well with or against the European Union project?
It faces the same trouble it does everywhere. People who have a lot of money in fossil fuel will do what they can to slow it down; we must do what we can to match their money with our passion, spirit and creativity – those are the currencies of movements.
Tags: Interview