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Writer and activist Bill McKibben put out a call for action on climate change at UCSB Sunday night, and it went beyond plugs for energy-efficient light bulbs and gas-sipping cars. To start with, he said, America needs a powerful political effort — something as big as the Civil Rights movement.
"Nothing short of that will do," he told the audience of several hundred people.
Then it's time to rethink the country's goals, he said. Economic growth, in the traditional sense, isn't good for the environment, he argued — or for Americans.  McKibben spoke at UCSB Sunday. Anna Davison/SBN
McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, was the final speaker in UCSB's "Global Warming Science & Society" series — the brainchild of UCSB professor David Lea, who wanted "to get a conversation going." Earlier talks featured NASA scientist and climate change authority James Hansen and award-winning journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, who traveled to the Arctic to see the effects of climate change.
Lea said he wanted to present information on climate change "at a level people can access and feel like they're really getting unbiased information. We didn't cut corners, we didn't sugar-coat anything."
McKibben certainly didn't on Sunday night.
Climate change, he said, "is the biggest thing humans have ever done, the biggest change we've been able to induce in the world."
The problem calls for "a civilization-scale response," he added.
After spending a couple of decades pondering — and more recently, despairing over — climate change, McKibben formed a grassroots group called "Step it Up 2007" earlier this year. It's calling on Congress to put the country on course to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. On April 14, people in 1400 locations around the country turned out to support that goal and call for urgent action.
While climate change skeptics have been vocal, the vast majority of scientists believe that human-induced climate change is real — and a real problem. McKibben said Americans are becoming increasingly concerned.
The first step toward tackling the problem is political action, he said Sunday, and the country "needs a good bill out of Congress in the next three years." The next election, he added, "is crucial."
He complimented Presidential candidate John Edwards for a "barn-burning" speech at a "Step it Up 2007" rally, and for adopting the 80 percent reduction goal as a policy platform.
Beyond that, McKibben questions the country's quest for economic growth, which has traditionally required increasing use of fossil fuels, which contributes to climate change.
He noted on Sunday that most Americans check the status of the economic — via stock prices, housing data and so forth — more often than the state of the planet. The result of that single-minded focus on growth, he said, has been "incredible ecological peril" — and, McKibben argues, unhappiness.
He cited surveys that found that Americans were happiest in the 1950s, and since then they've become increasingly dissatisfied, despite having huge houses, oversized cars and more stuff.
Isolation is the problem, McKibben said Sunday, and the push for economic growth has turned out to be "a bad bargain."
It's time, he said, to build stronger local communities — to "Think Globally, Act Neighborly," he said, quoting a friend's bumper sticker. McKibben pointed to the growing popularity of farmers' markets as a step in the right direction. The food on offer hasn't been lugged across the country, and shopping at a farmers' market has been shown - scientifically — to be much more social than a trip to the supermarket. McKibben also envisages an energy system that's akin to a farmers' market: the power generated by his solar panel might run his neighbor's fridge.
We should, he said, "try to reel in some of the supply lines that we spent the last century flinging out."
McKibben also wants Americans "to feel good about the things we should feel good about." For Santa Barbarans, that could mean celebrating the popularity of cycling.
All in all, he thinks the United States could learn a lot from European societies that consume less and have stronger communities.
"We've got to figure out how to live less like Americans," he said. |
