Bill McKibben at Dominican. Photo: Stuart Lirette
The voice of doom emanated last week from a tall, soft spoken Vermonter speaking to a packed Earth Day audience at Dominican’s Angelico Hall. From ocean acidification to climate refugees to food crises and severe weather events, Bill McKibben laid out the scenario of devastation that we can expect to see around the world as global warming takes its toll. The statistics and stories were depressing, but McKibben was careful not to end like the “professional bummer-outer” he called himself.
McKibben applauded the GreenMBA and other sustainability efforts at Dominican. He spent the second half of his talk on the founding of 350.org, a global movement to raise awareness of the toll that climate change is taking now and will take in the future, and how unified action at the individual up to the international government levels is needed, and needed now.
The talk promoted Mckibben’s new book Eaarth–the extra A emphasizes that this is a whole new world to which we’ll be adapting. A highlight of the evening were selected photos and stories from last October 24, the day of dubbed by CNN the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” with 5,200 actions in 181 countries.
McKibben described creating a movement from scratch. Among the challenges was picking a name: 350 refers to the 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists have pegged as the limit we need to achieve if we want to preserve the earth’s current environment. The idea of 350 presented challenges: numbers are not the best way to tug on heart strings. But the number also is easily “translatable’ to the greatest number of people, and McKibben wanted to emphasize the global nature of the problem and of the movement. A video produced for 350.org by Free Range Studios has been nominated for a Webby (and Bill urged us to vote for it):
To vote, go to Free Range’s site for instructions.
McKibben meets with GreenMBA students after speaking. Photo: Stuart Lirette
McKibben acknowledged that the global day of action was not enough to affect the outcome of last winter’s climate talks in Copenhagen. Emphasizing that there was no guarantee that activism will work, nevertheless McKibben encouraged all the audience members to become involved with 350.org’s next global event on October 10 (10/10/2010). Rather than a demonstration, October 10 will be a Global Work Day for the environment, with people starting community gardens, installing solar panels, clearing bike paths, and anything else we can come up with between now and October. 350.org hopes that the Global Work Party will send the message to leaders: “We’re working—what about you?” Bill McKibben ended his latest book, as he ended last night’s talk, with words of optimism, “But we still must live in the world we’ve created–lightly, carefully, gracefully.”
