[W]hen Vermonter Bill McKibben stepped down last winter as chairman of the grassroots environmental group 350.org, the 54-year-old globetrotting author and activist — “ready for a bit more order in my life” — said he wanted to spend more time grounded in his home state.
But that didn’t stop the Ripton resident from introducing U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at the White House aspirant’s recent campaign kickoff in Burlington. Or from publishing open letters this month offering advice to President Barack Obama and the front runner aiming to replace him, Hillary Clinton. Or from praising Pope Francis for the Catholic leader’s encyclical urging the world to confront climate change.
“This message from the pope is a major turning point,” McKibben said Friday at the Wanderlust Festival, which is drawing several thousand yoga and meditation devotees to Stratton Mountain Resort. “The moment in which we live is the most important in human history. There is no guarantee we’re going to win this fight. But there is a guarantee we’re going to fight.”
Wanderlust — a four-day “celebration of mindful living” produced by the people who organize Austin City Limits, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza — usually features speakers such as spiritualist Deepak Chopra, who appeared at the event’s Vermont launch in 2011. But this year, the festival chose McKibben to share the spotlight with such new age luminaries as Oprah Winfrey’s yoga teacher, Rodney Yee.
“I’ve got a roof covered with solar panels and I drove here in my electric car, but the problem we face is structural and systemic and rooted in power,” the environmentalist said. “The most important thing individuals can do is not be individuals. There’s great power in joining with others. There’s great release from despair the minute you find yourself engaged in action commensurate to the size of the crisis.”
McKibben has gone to great lengths to fight climate change ever since he wrote The End of Nature, the first book about global warming for a general audience a quarter-century ago. The author devoted all of Thursday, for example, to reading Pope Francis’ just-released 183-page encyclical on climate change.
“Simply by writing it, the pope — the single most prominent person on the planet, and of all celebrities and leaders the most skilled at using gesture to communicate — has managed to get across the crucial point: Our environmental peril, and in particular, climate change, is the most pressing issue of our time,” McKibben went on to blog on the New York Review of Books website.
“The heart of the encyclical is less an account of environmental or social destruction than a remarkable attack on the way our world runs: on the ‘rapidification’ of modern life, on the way that economic growth and technology trump all other concerns, on a culture that can waste billions of people. These are neither liberal nor conservative themes, and they are not new for popes: what is new is that the ecological crisis makes them inescapable.”
While McKibben appreciates the pope’s message, he believes other world leaders must do more. Earlier this month, he posed two open letters on the environmental news website grist.org to the man who is U.S. president and the woman who hopes to succeed him.
In the first letter — titled “You still have time to be a climate champion — but not much” — McKibben credited Obama for funding renewable energy projects, improving motor vehicle gas mileage and regulating coal.
“That list beats the combined efforts of all the presidents that came before you in the global warming era,” he wrote. “And that you achieved these things in the face of GOP congressional intransigence that made the obvious policy change (a price on carbon) impossible means that no one can accuse you of neglecting the issue.”
But McKibben isn’t pleased the United States has passed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil and gas producer. Supporting renewable alternatives such as solar and wind, he called on Obama to curb drilling, fracking, mining and to ban construction of a proposed $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline to carry tar-sands oil from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
“Cutting demand for dirty energy at the same time that you increase its supply is called running in place,” he wrote Obama. “That may have been a short-term boost to the economy, but it’s a long-term horror for the atmosphere.”
In his second letter — titled “Now it’s really time to get serious about climate change” — McKibben urged Democrat Hillary Clinton to spotlight the issue in her presidential campaign.
“Do your part in pushing back against tired attacks that solving climate change is going to cost jobs or hurt our economy or hurt workers in coal plants,” he wrote. “You could talk up how leaning into solar and wind energy will create jobs across the country, pull profits out of the Swiss bank accounts of fossil fuel barons, and alleviate income inequality across the board.”
McKibben is supporting fellow Vermonter Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. But if Clinton wins, the environmentalist wants her to make history by changing the nation’s energy paradigm.
“The two great presidential technology initiatives of the 20th century came from Democratic heroes: FDR turned our industrial might into a Nazi-killing machine, and JFK galvanized your generation with a decade-long flight to the moon,” he wrote. “As it happens, a team of the world’s best scientists and economists said earlier this month that an Apollo-scale effort could put the world on renewable energy by 2025. If we did that, HRC would join those other initials.”
But convincing people to simply listen to the words “climate change” can be a challenge. McKibben’s Wanderlust talk wasn’t nearly as well attended as competing yoga presentations with such titles as “Foreplay to Handstand,” “Powered Up Backbends” and “Duuude, My Shoulders!”
“It’s more fun to go to other stuff,” he said when asked by one attendee why the Stratton church hosting his talk was not full. “I think people are deeply worried about this, but it seems so big and we seem so small. And the enormous power of the fossil fuel industry keeps us from changing.”
Even so, McKibben has seen progress in his lifetime. Born in California and schooled in Massachusetts, he worked at The New Yorker magazine before releasing the now classic “The End of Nature” in 1989. Moving to Vermont in 2001, he bought a small plot once owned by poet Robert Frost, built a solar-powered home and became a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. There he helped organize a climate change club that would morph into 350.org.
In 2011, McKibben was one of 1,200 protesters arrested during a two-week White House demonstration against the Keystone pipeline that became the country’s largest display of civil disobedience in 30 years. Last September he led the first-ever People’s Climate March, which drew 400,000 people to the streets of midtown Manhattan on the eve of a United Nations summit on the issue.
Read McKibben’s most recent book, “Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist,” and you’ll learn how such efforts had an impact — on him.
“Shaky. Unnerved by it all. Overwhelmed. Frustrated and a little resentful,” he revealed in the 2013 hardcover. “A writer, if you think about it, is someone who has decided their nature requires them to hole up in a room and type. You can violate your nature for a while, but eventually it takes a toll.”
And so McKibben passed on the chairmanship of 350.org to someone else in December and came home to concentrate on writing, be it missives on why institutions should divest their fossil fuel stocks or a coming New Yorker story featuring two of his favorite topics: Vermont and energy.
“We live in a world defined by fossil fuel, and our job is to change that,” McKibben told the Wanderlust audience. “We’re not going to stop global warming, but we can slow it down. I’m absolutely sure that people eventually will do the right thing. What’s dicey is whether they’ll do it while it can still matter.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
