Bill McKibben looks like he’s been to activist training camp
to me—or like he could be running the training camp himself. Jedi material, even. But, apparently, he has surprised
himself. Maybe he surprised a lot of
people. He is a self-proclaimed
introvert and I suppose society doesn’t expect its introverts to move into
center stage, make a fuss, and go to jail for justice. (Rosa Parks might though. Or Gandhi.)
But he seems like a likely activist to me. An ideal activist who was moved by the
reality of the data to take a position and build a movement that, with the
thoughtfulness of an introvert, could undermine the money that is trying to buy
out the potential for reasonable solutions. He is pragmatic and perspicacious. And
he gave a great talk with great pictures of environmentalists all around the
world. Here’s one from Ghana (from 350.org’s Flicker page):
My students and I have been reading his book from 1989,
which is completely relevant 25 years later (although this fact is not ideal)—The End of Nature. My young, hopeful students were looking
despondent and sounding depressed in their blogs. I felt a pressing need to take their pulses (which
I refrained from). His talk, however,
offered the energy and optimism they look for.
Actions that we could all take to be part of the 350.org movement to
spread the word that we need to divest from fossil fuels to minimize the damage
to the future planet, actions big and small.
Near the end of his book, McKibben says “There is no future in loving
nature.” Well, damn it. Too late. And it was too late for him, so he did what a
person who loves does—he began looking for solutions, and initiating them, even
with the knowledge that they may not work.
In The Cloister Walk (1996),
Kathleen Norris says that “Maybe monks and poets know, as Jesus did when a
friend, in an extravagant, loving gesture, bathed his feet in nard, an
expensive fragrant oil, and wiped them with her hair, that the symbolic act matters; that those who know the exact
price of things, as Judas did, often don’t know the true cost or value of
anything.” Bill McKibben knows too. I hope that all of us who are committed to
change will make the symbolic acts that have personal and global implications. It may matter a great deal, so that at the
end of the nature we’ve known in the last umpteen thousand years (as a species…I’m
not that old), we will be able to begin the humbler path McKibben talks about, where we learn to live within nature’s bounds.
McKibben said that “The only power to combat money is a people
movement…to build a currency of people.”
Money can’t beat a bunch of committed people when there are enough of
them. At least, here’s hoping.
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