Bill McKibben: environmental rock star
This week I had the pleasure of hearing environmentalist Bill McKibben speak at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. His books, The End of Nature and Deep Economy were pivotal in shifting my perspective on what’s important. His most recent book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a frightening but very important read.
I’ve heard Bill speak many times in many different places at Powershift ’09 in Washington DC with 14,000 college kids, the Green Faith event at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in VT at the Slow Money Gathering and at the recent Slow Living Conference in Brattleboro. He is very much loved by these groups and gives a feisty talk.
While I love to be in Vt and in DC surrounded by environmentally aware folks. But the reality is that I live in Westchester County, a very comfortable suburb of NYC, not at all concerned about climate change, peak oil or economic collapse. Surrounded by wealth and beauty of Stone Barns, a result of the Rockefeller oil money, Bill toned it down a bit for comfy crowd in Westchester.
One point Bill made that I hope my county will heed.
#1 A warmer planet is a wetter planet. As we are already 1 degree warmer, we can expect more rain, more floods. Right now the Mississippi and Missouri rivers are flooding towns along their path. Lake Champlain in VT is at record high levels. Unusually wet is the new normal when it comes to weather. My friends who are farmers are very much aware of this fact. Many of them had a tough time getting their transplants from the green house into the ground due to the excessive rains we’ve had all spring. As Bill says, we are conducting a large mosquito raising experiment. As a result, Dengue Fever has now spread to the Florida Keys.
Flooded out minivan in suburbia
The day after Bill’s talk, over an inch of rain dumped on my part of Westchester County in less than an hour, causing massive flooding in parking lots. I wonder how many of my neighbors take a minute to connect the dots between the excessive rain and climate change as they rush to move their cars to higher ground? The motto in my town seems to be “stay calm and keep shopping”, people aren’t stopping to consider the implications of the weird weather.
Mother Nature will continue to provide teachable moments. I hope that someday soon, my neighbors start to re-think how we all contribute to this wacky weather when we drive, fly, run the AC and eat food from faraway. We all must do what we can to cut our use of fossil fuels. We all must do what we can to re-localize our food, start community gardens and turn our lawns into places to grow food.
Steven Thomson took a recent op-ed that Bill Mc Kibben wrote for the Washington Post and added some imagery to it and turned it into a short, but disturbing video. I hope people start to wake up soon. Our future is at stake.
