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Bill McKibben thought he knew where he came from. He grew up in the tidy, affluent and predominantly white suburban community of Lexington, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he gave tours on the Lexington Battle Green, regaling visitors with tales about the opening shots of the American Revolution. He thought the United States was the greatest force for good in the world.
Fifty years later, McKibben, now 61, has a very different perspective. He sees a world riven by racial and economic inequality. He has dedicated his life to stopping the climate crisis, a human-caused disaster that his generation has done much to create. The big question on McKibben’s mind today is this:
What the hell happened?
Bill McKibben tackles this question in his new book, “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.” McKibben lives in Ripton, Vermont, and is the author of more than a dozen other books, including “The End of Nature,” which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, writes a blog about the climate crisis called The Crucial Years and founded the global grassroots climate campaign 350.org. He was the recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the Right Livelihood Award, known as “the alternative Nobel.” He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His latest project is Third Act, which is organizing people over 60 for progressive change.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
David Goodman
Your new book is a memoir as much of a place as of a person. Introduce us to your hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, and why you felt it merited a closer look than you gave it when you were growing up there.
Bill McKibben
I never wrote anything like a memoir, and this isn’t that much of one either in large part because where I grew up was so average and normal and ordinary in so many ways. Lexington was a kind of ur-suburb, 30,000 people just outside of Boston, the quintessential bedroom community so middle American that I literally grew up halfway down a leafy road called Middle Street. It was all-American in profound ways because Lexington styled itself the birthplace of American liberty, the site of the first battle of the revolution. And indeed, for some years in junior high, my summer job was giving tours of the battle green wearing my tricorn hat.
David Goodman
You were telling stories as a teenage tour guide about the Lexington Battle Green, but as an older person, you’ve come to realize that big parts of the story were missing. So tell us your tour guide spiel and what you now realize was missing from it.
Bill McKibben
I’m very glad that I did that in a way because I think it set me up for much of what I’ve spent my life doing. To me, it was always the story of the first battle against imperialism and colonialism any place on the planet. The Minutemen were real heroes. It taught me never to confuse patriotism and dissent. Dissent was a patriotic duty. So I’m grateful for those stories. But as we’ve learned more about American history over the last 50 years, many pictures have been shadowed and darkened in lots of ways.
I’ll give you an example. I was rereading the Paul Revere account of his ride to Lexington and Concord to warn of the approach of the British. It is as iconic an account as there is in American history. It’s what Longfellow worked from when he wrote his great poem. Revere is writing 20 years after the event. He said, “I was galloping along through Charlestown Common and I came running into the spot where Mark hung in chains. And then two British officers almost got me and I had to wheel my horse.” The account continues, but the part that I had never noticed before was the offhand description “under the spot where Mark hung in chains.” What was that about? It took a fair amount of research to find because really no one’s written about it.
It turns out that 20 years before the revolution, a slave in Boston named Mark Codman had a particularly brutal master who he’d killed. Instead of being tried for murder or manslaughter, they charged him with treason. And his body was not only drawn and quartered, it was placed in an iron cage — a gibbet — and left hanging over Charlestown Common for decades. The flesh rotted off the bones and there they hung. And clearly it had become a landmark that everybody in New England new because Revere just used it offhandedly in the way you’d say “next to the Hannafords.” That cast a different light on the sons of liberty, on the fight for freedom, to be reminded that that was also part of that place and time. It was a good way into having to think harder about how that story about race had played out over the subsequent 200 years including in places like Lexington, a liberal town but not a diverse one.
David Goodman
It is remarkable to consider that a story that is so foundational and so much a part of the American mythology, but you could hardly find an account of the Black people involved in the story of Lexington.
Bill McKibben
And truth be told, you can hardly find a Black person in Lexington. Not when I was there and not now. Not because of overt segregation, at least by the time that I come along. It had become a liberal town, a town that voted for George McGovern in 1972, a town where Martin Luther King had been welcomed in the sixties. But a town that also took its commitment to suburbanization seriously and voted down a referendum when I was 10 to have even the most modest of an affordable housing development in town. Because what is a suburb? It’s a collection of homes that appreciate in value. And I don’t think anyone was willing to take any chances with that appreciating in value part.
David Goodman
Suburbs don’t become the way they are by chance, as you discovered when you went back to learn how it came to be that there’s no affordable housing in town. How did that happen?
Bill McKibben
In the sixties in Boston there was a move to try and integrate the suburbs. They started voluntarily busing kids out from Boston to suburban schools. And in places like Lexington, some people began trying to figure out how to make the town more diverse. Lexington had the wonderfully named Suburban Responsibility Commission. And they decided that part of their suburban responsibility was to have some affordable housing. Which means of course, some housing that didn’t look like all the other houses in Lexington, each with its own driveway and backyard. If you’re going to have affordable housing it’s going to be grouped together in units somehow. And so there was a proposal put forward for 100 units of this. Every town official came out in favor of it, including the planning board and the select board, and the town meeting voted in favor of it. Lexington had a representative town meeting. So 230 people representing the 30,000 people of Lexington and all the ministers in town were in favor of it.
But the people in the neighborhood where it was going to be built petitioned to have a referendum in Lexington. And when people actually went into the voting booth by secret ballot to make their voices known, it went down to defeat two to one. As the newspaper said the next week, “If there’s actually some need for affordable housing, let us henceforth go very cautiously and slowly down this path.” And Lexington like most suburbs never really did go very far down that path, in large part because it kept getting richer and richer and richer, and property values got higher and higher. And it got harder to do anything like that.
David Goodman
We talk about structural racism and systemic issues, but it’s hard for a lot of people to understand systems, which by their nature are complex. You explain it by taking it down to the level of your house. Tell us the story of your house and what it teaches us about wealth accumulation, race and class.
Bill McKibben
If you want to understand how it is that the wealth gap between Black and white and America keeps widening, it’s worth understanding how most wealth got accumulated, which was with the appreciation of property values. My parents bought that house on Middle Street in 1970 for $30,000, which would be roughly $200,000 in today’s money. When it was sold last year, it went for $1 million. So there’d been an $800,000 appreciation, not based on anything that was done to it—it was basically still the same house. So if you’d been able to hop on that escalator at the bottom, you could ride it straight up. But in order to do that, you had to have $30,000 in 1975, which for all the reasons that we can recount about American history, meant white people, not Black people. I will add that the escalator doesn’t even really stop there. As soon as somebody bought it for $1 million dollars, they tore it down and on this small footprint built something that looks like a cross between a junior high school and a medium security prison. I’m afraid the escalator continues to work. In fact, it seems to be accelerating,
David Goodman
That issue of generational wealth is so central to the story of segregation in America and how it came to be that white and Black America have proceeded along different paths. When we speak of structural racism, that is a big part of it right there.
Bill McKibben
I think it’s one of the reasons why there’s so many people who are so scared that somebody might teach critical race theory or just talk about American history in these terms in schools. I don’t really think it’s because they’re afraid of freaking their kids out. I think it’s because everybody feels some level of guilt over this that they do not really want to have to deal with.
David Goodman
This raises a practical issue: What does reparations look like?
Bill McKibben
Repair of some kind. At this point, majority opinion on this is that was all in the past. But “let bygones be bygones” is not really that noble a sentiment if you were the one who came out on top.
David Goodman
The title of your book is “The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon.” Right now we’re talking about the flag. And I couldn’t help but recall the Huey Long quote, “When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in an American flag.” How did the flag get appropriated by the right?
Bill McKibben
This is a place where I think progressives on the left have made a serious mistake over time. I think ceding both the flag and the Bible to the right wing is a real mistake. There are obviously things in both as we’ve been discussing about American history that have plenty of dark side. But there are also things that are really powerfully and importantly progressive. That fight on Lexington Green was about standing up for the proposition that people shouldn’t be subjugated to a king, that they should be able to make their own decisions in their own places– which was a very radical proposition and remains one to this day. It’s one of the things that the left in America made a mistake in just deciding that that was the property of the right, because it’s a potent and important set of symbols.
David Goodman
I just came across a photo from Mississippi in the 1960s of a policeman wrenching away an American flag from an African American child. The explanation noted that in Mississippi in the 1960s, carrying an American flag was considered left wing because “real Americans” carried a Confederate flag.
Bill McKibben
Dr. King leaned very heavily for strategic but also quite real reasons on American history as the bulwark of the civil rights movement. His theory was that American history needed to be extended to and include all people, which is probably a more powerful message than everything about American history is terrible.
David Goodman
Spirituality has been important to you in your life. What has happened to American Christianity in our lifetime?
Bill McKibben
That’s an interesting story. Just the numbers are fascinating. In 1970, 52% of Americans belonged to one of the mainline liberal Protestant denominations — Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodist. Fifty years later, that number is about 15%. That’s an incredible change in a very short period of time. What happened? They were replaced by evangelical Christianity, which followed the same path as our political history. We went from a religious consensus on the idea of building a better community and of working in harmony, to an evangelical Christianity that was mostly focused on the very individual and personal relationship with God, and had no use and no time for building a better community. It became the ally of the exact same trend in our political life, exemplified by Ronald Reagan, and the move to a kind of hyper-individualized, privatized political world where we gave up on the Depression-era, post World War Two-era project of building an America that provided a modest prosperity for everyone, and instead went to work in America where the goal was to see if some people could get super rich and let market forces solve all problems instead of trying to see if we might be able to solve them together.
David Goodman
As a college newspaper reporter you actually took a trip to the megachurch of Jim and Tammy Bakker, one of the first multi-million dollar televangelist empires. What did you see when you got there?
Bill McKibben
Heritage USA which they built was at the time the second biggest tourist attraction in America behind only Disney World, which is what it looked like. It had rides and hotels and a re-creation of the room where Jesus had the last supper. Of course, it was mostly grift. There was a giant ziggurat of headquarters, Crystal Palace, where they did their broadcasts from. But in the basement, there was a room with 100 or 200 women sitting at tables just slitting open envelopes and shaking out checks and prayer requests. And the checks went to the bank and the prayer requests went into the trash. And that was PTL, Praise the Lord. I saw early what direction that was all going to take.
David Goodman
You were part of a New England church community when you grew up. What is the appeal of the evangelical churches that has enabled them to become these enormous grift machines and are so popular?
Bill McKibben
It’s precisely the same appeal of Reagan-era political life: you don’t have a responsibility to anybody but yourself. And responsibility in church terms is relatively easily taken care of: you announce you’re Christian, perhaps you’re born again in some ceremony, and then good to go. There’s no responsibility to the larger world, you don’t have to try and deal with the difficult problems of poverty or the things that Jesus insisted we were supposed to be dealing with. So it was much easier in that sense.
David Goodman
Talk about the nexus of race and the evangelical movement. You quote one scholar saying, “The best way to predict how often a white evangelical will go to church is to know his score on an index of racial feelings: the more racist, the more hours in the pews.”
Bill McKibben
What the sociologists have found is that either as a cause or a result of being an evangelical Christian, people have developed a set of beliefs about the world, including a very strong belief that everybody’s outcomes are the result of their own free will and their own hard work. So when you ask people, “Black people are much poorer than white people in this country. Is that the result of them not working hard or is that the result of racism?” Evangelicals by and large say, “They don’t work hard. And if they did, everything would be okay.” That is part and parcel of that very personalized view of religion. It’s a one on one relationship between you and God and a very personalized view of political life. It can’t deal with the notion that history matters, that structures matter, that facts matter.
David Goodman
I want to move on to the station wagon, which is your way of describing the suburbs. We grew up in an era when suburbia was the American dream, the embodiment of everything a working American was supposed to strive for. But you say that it has created a nightmare.
Bill McKibben
There was much to be said for the kind of modest prosperity that it promised. And it was a good world in many ways. But it was a world utterly dependent on and built around the automobile. The American project since the end of World War Two was mostly building bigger houses farther apart from each other. And that was only possible because we had this means to travel between them and move our stuff between them. And that was based on the car. We took the car absolutely for granted and we loved it.
As the first two oil shocks unraveled in the 1970s, there wasn’t enough gas to go around. What was fascinating politically was that it wasn’t really clear exactly what we were going to make of it. And Jimmy Carter, bless his heart, did his level best to try and make us understand that this was an important moment to make a different choice. He was saying things like you simply can’t make a good life that’s based just on consumption, we really have to recognize limits.
David Goodman
He came to personify this by sitting in cardigan sweaters in a cool White House.
Bill McKibben
And he was mocked for it. When we came to the 1980 election, he was beaten by Ronald Reagan in what I think was the pivotal election of our lifetime. That was the moment we made the very fateful choice between some kind of collective effort at building a working America and the idea that that wasn’t our job. Our job was just each one of us getting rich. Reagan’s favorite slogan was “government is the problem, not the solution.” Of course, government is just the name for what we all do together to try and make things work. Reagan’s favorite laugh line, decade after decade, speech after speech, was “the nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.’” We now realize that the scariest words in the English language are “we’ve run out of ventilators” or “the hillside behind your house has caught on fire.” But we can’t shake the political habits that we started with Reagan. Obama said in 2020, Even though I had 60 senators, I felt like I couldn’t escape the Reagan mold of the world. His influence hung so heavily — that idea that markets solved problems, governments didn’t solve them. To his credit, Joe Biden is trying to shake us out of that. But Congress isn’t having it because they came up in that other, more privatized world.
David Goodman
The triumph of Reaganism was, in simplest terms, “public is bad, private is good.” I think there is a straight line from Reaganism to how we have fared during the pandemic, in which the U.S. has had the worst outcome in the industrialized world.
Bill McKibben
It’s very true. But let’s don’t despair entirely. One of the things that’s good to note is the persistence of the desire of many Americans to do the right thing for the people around them. Two thirds of Americans tried to do the right thing during the pandemic. Here in Vermont, the number was much, much higher because we have the highest levels of social trust in the country. But it turns out that a third of people is enough to frustrate efforts at public health and enough to screw up most things, especially when they’re full of the kind of insane intensity that they seem to be at the moment.
David Goodman
Talk about the connection between the world that you’re describing over the last 50 years and the climate crisis.
Bill McKibben
I’ve spent my life working on the climate crisis and it has its most significant roots in that suburbanization of the United States. The 4% of the world that lives in this country have produced 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide. And most of that comes not from factories but from big cars and big houses, that suburban explosion. It beats even the rapid industrialization of China over the last 20 years as the biggest puff of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So our particular habits of mind that sort of came out of that suburban era are now written firmly in the geological record and continue to make it extremely hard for us to make progress. The fact that gas prices have gone up continues to dominate our political life 50 years on. And Joe Biden, who ran on protecting the climate, is off having to kiss the ring of the King of Saudi Arabia in order to try and get some cheaper gas for a little while.
David Goodman
You often say that you’ve lost more fights than you’ve won. But you have won some: you were a big part of stopping the Keystone pipeline, for starters. What do you glean from the wins? What are the themes from the things that have worked?
Bill McKibben
You have to win the argument, but you also have to win the fight. You have to be right on the data and evidence, but you also have to figure out what it is about things that will move people to really go take action, to put it on the line. Part of that is having the sense that a fight might succeed, and if it did succeed, the success might be big enough to matter. The Keystone Pipeline was a good example of that. We were able to persuade people that this was really important. [Climate scientist] Jim Hanson said, If you keep building out the tar sands of Canada where this pipeline is coming from and it’ll be game over for the climate. People responded and rallied to that.
Things often work best if they’re rooted in people’s memories, ideas, hopes. We’re doing this organizing now with Third Act for people over the age of 60. Part of that work is to try and remind people that they grew up in a moment of extraordinary and epic transformation in the 60s and 70s, the moment when we started taking women seriously as full parts of society, the apex of the civil rights movement when the franchise was being expanded. The moment when we first began to think that perhaps wars were not the best way of solving problems. The first Earth Day brought the passage of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Part of the message at Third Act is reminding us that we’re capable of doing this, that we’ve done things in the past, and that it felt good to do them and do them together. People have been responding to that in big ways. We’ve got tens of thousands of people signing up and going to work. There’s a certain amount of romance in anything that’s working like that
David Goodman
You were last on the Vermont Conversation for in March for an idea that you had put out there about heat pumps for peace, in which you proposed that President Biden should invoke the Defense Production Act to create cheap heat pumps for Europe as a way of cutting the legs out from under Putin and the other petrocrats. Give us an update.
Bill McKibben
We went to work with very smart people at a group called Rewiring America and came up with an actual plan. And we started to work at Third Act and had people write thousands of letters. Older people still remember how to put a letter in an envelope and stick a stamp on it. It’s kind of a superpower, because in an age of endless email, letters actually really stand out. Alongside us, a wonderful 11 year old from someplace deep in Brooklyn, Lillian Fortuna, set up a website and started collecting petition signatures from people her age for this project. Two weeks ago, the Biden administration said, Okay, we will invoke the Defense Production Act and start building heat pumps. They’re not at the moment planning to send them to Europe, they’re more thinking about doing them here. But that’s fine. Oil is a globally traded commodity and if we can cut our demand here, that’ll reduce the price that Vladimir Putin is able to get for his oil and the leverage he has with it. Hopefully, it’s the beginning of many other similar steps. It’s a small step and by no means decisive in either the battle in the Ukraine or the battle over the climate. But the good news is Biden can do it without having to get Joe Manchin’s permission. Hopefully, it’ll nerve them up to do some more things like that.
David Goodman
What will be the practical effect?
Bill McKibben
America has a heat pump, which is great technology. Sue and I heat and cool our home in Ripton with one. It’s basically just an air conditioner that also works in reverse. It takes the heat in the ambient air outside and uses it to heat your home using electricity. It’s incredibly efficient compared to the open flame running your gas furnace. It’s one of the things that needs to quickly happen over the next few years if we’re to meet the targets that the scientists have told us we must meet to have any hope of dealing with climate change. Many of the world’s air conditioner factories are here in the U.S. and they’re perfectly capable of churning out lots of these things if there’s some demand and some government support for doing it. The last time that fascist armies were on the march across Europe, we started spinning out tanks and planes and ships to deal with it. We may need some of that this time to help Ukraine. But we need even more lots of EV chargers and air source heat pumps to help us build the kind of world where simply having control of a lot of oil fields like Vladimir Putin does will no longer give you the power to terrorize entire continents.
David Goodman
Part of writing a memoir is the process of making sense of your life. You’re doing a deep dive both into your own story and the American story. What insights you have gleaned from that?
Bill McKibben
I’ve always known that I’m out of sync historically with my time and place. Ronald Reagan turned into an incredibly popular politician, but I always hated what he was doing to our sense of who we were and what our country should be. So maybe following in the steps of the Minutemen, I’ve been in opposition to the powerful for as long as I can remember. And clearly, that had something to do with those lessons I was absorbing in that church on the edge of Lexington Green. I hope that someday the story of this country goes back to being what I thought the story of this country was when I was young. I hope that we take the steps to reclaim American history and make it live up to the ideals that struck me so much. That’s an earnest hope. It may be an impossible one at this late date–we shall see. But at least for the moment, I continue to be engaged in that fight–it’s great fun this Third Act work we’re doing–and to have some company of like-minded people from the same time and place.
David Goodman
Right now, a lot of people are struggling with despair and so much in the world, whether it’s the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, the racial polarization, the gun violence…
Bill McKibben
… and the fact that that many of our countrymen stormed our nation’s capitol, killing policemen in order to stop the counting of ballots…
David Goodman
Yes, that too. Democracy is truly on a precipice and none of us really can say with any confidence that it’s going to make it off the cliff. I hope I haven’t set you up to fail here with that, but I would like to end by asking what gives you hope?
Bill McKibben
I don’t always feel an extraordinary amount of hope, but there are a couple of things that make me hopeful. One is that it’s been wonderful to watch movements come together over the last decade. I’ve been working hard in this climate movement, which didn’t exist 15 years ago. But then starting with 350.org, we’ve managed to build big global movements that are now much bigger than anything we imagined. The Greta Thunbergs of the world and things we’ve done work miracles. So that’s encouraging. They haven’t won yet, but they’ve put up a stiff challenge to the powers that be.
And then of course it’s a great privilege to get to live in Vermont. We’re far from perfect and we’ve got many things that we need to work on. But it’s good to be in a place where people look out for each other and take care of each other in ways that minimize hatred and division and maximize community. I don’t know whether that can shift the direction the world’s going in, but it’s very much the place I’m glad to be hanging out while all the rest of this stuff is going on.
