Bill McKibben is a writer, environmentalist, and founder of Step It Up 2007, an organization that sponsored rallies in hundreds of American cities on April 14, 2007, to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution eighty percent by 2050. McKibben’s books include The End of Nature (Random House, 1989); The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Eerdmans, 1994); The Age of Missing Information (Random House, 1995), a comparison between twenty-four hours of one hundred cable television programs and twenty-four hours on an Adirondack mountaintop; Hope, Human and Wild (Little, Brown, & Co., 1995); Maybe One (Simon & Schuster, 1998), a discourse on human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously (Simon & Schuster, 2000); Enough (Times Books, 2003); and Wandering Home (Crown, 2005). His most recent book is Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007). McKibben is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The New Yorker, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships and the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing. In 2006, McKibben helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming. He currently resides in Ripton, Vermont.
What do you make of where we are right now? I have read enough of your work to know that you are no Cassandra, but has there been a personal frustration in having this knowledge and seeing others ignore it? Hope has been a theme of your work but there must be periods where you feel some hopelessness at people’s unwillingness to see the evidence in front of them.
Bill McKibben: For long periods I have, I confess, despaired a little. I never thought it would be easy (The End of Nature is not exactly an upbeat title) but I’ve been dismayed by how little has happened, how easily the powers that be have swept the problem under the rug. But those days are over. We’re clearly making real progress in the last couple of years—hurricane Katrina blew the door open, Al Gore walked through with his movie, and by the time they were done the education process was very nearly complete. Now we’re at the movement-building moment, and that’s going well too. I kicked off the organizing for a march across Vermont last summer—by its end we had one thousand people walking. Which was a lot for Vermont, but it was also the largest demonstration about global warming yet in this country, and that was pathetic.
With that in mind we launched Stepitup07.org in early January. We asked people to organize rallies in their communities for April 14 (instead of a big march on Washington—too much carbon!). We thought, maybe, we could organize a couple of hundred of these actions. But by mid-February we’d blown by the 650 mark. There are sororities and retirement communities and national environmental groups and churches and rock-climbers and you name it—people were simply waiting for the opening to make their voices heard. It’s been unbelievably moving and inspiring.
Gessner: Place has obviously been paramount to you in your life and work. You now teach at Middlebury College, not too far from the Adirondack Mountains that you have written so often about, but not in them. Can you describe how that move came about and what it has meant to you? Has it affected your writing?
McKibben: Well, I’ve come to think of myself as living in the mountains on either side of Lake Champlain—to imagine it as one large eco-region. That was one of the themes of Wandering Home, a book I wrote a couple of years ago about walking from Vermont back to my old house in the Adirondacks. The two sides complement each other nicely—the pastoral and settled and quite beautifully inhabited landscape of Vermont, the wild and beautifully left alone landscape of the Adirondacks. Wendell Berry and Ed Abbey. We need ‘em both.
Gessner: This journal concerns itself not just with physical ecotones but also with edges between literary genres. The End of Nature established you as one of our best journalistic writers and you have continued to work as a journalist. But elements of the personal essay, the nature essays, and even more personal and spiritual reflections have always made their way into your work, sometimes prominently. Have you enjoyed working these edges between the personal and the objective?
McKibben: I don’t think too much about writing, I fear. I have a fairly utilitarian approach—I use what’s needed for the task at hand. Sometimes that’s facts to appeal to the head, sometimes stories to appeal to other parts of my readers. I’ve always leaned heavily on reporting—I think telling the tales of others is my greatest pleasure. Finding embers and blowing on them in the hopes sparks will spread.
Gessner: If even the more modest predictions for global warming are correct, then the world now has its back to the wall. In these times is someone who writes about the natural world compelled to be an activist? Ed Abbey, never shy, said that to have convictions and not act on them is moral cowardice. But for many of us, it doesn’t seem that simple. Writers tend to be most concerned with the making of sentences, and there are plenty of writers who feel that politics “taints” the work. Some fear being considered “preachy.” Is this simply dependent on the temperament of individuals? Or are we at a time when there needs to be a larger compulsion to act? Do writers need to re-awaken to politics beyond the merely literary politics of their own reputations?
McKibben: I don’t feel like talking for all writers. For me, activism has been essential from the beginning. And I notice for most of my close friends in the nature writing world that’s how it’s worked: Terry Tempest Williams in the Utah deserts, Rick Bass defending the Yaak, Richard Nelson in the rainforests of Alaska, Barry Lopez on a hundred fronts, Wendell Berry in the world of agriculture and in defense of the mountains of Kentucky. It’s a less ego-filled literary community than some others, I think, because one, we’re all outdoors a lot, where it’s hard to take yourself that seriously, and two, we know that there are fights that really matter out there.
Gessner: Anyone who writes about trees or bugs tends to get lumped into the environmental writing category, but as you know there are a wide range of writers—Chaucer, say, or Melville—who write about the natural world. But it’s safe to say that most of your work—even Maybe One—has had at the very least an environmental slant. How did the environment evolve as your subject? Was it always that way? Did you find it or it you? What have been the pleasures and frustrations of being associated with the genre?
McKibben: I read Wendell Berry and I read Ed Abbey and they shook up my mental picture in my mid-twenties (when I was still writing the Talk of the Town for the New Yorker). And I moved to the Adirondacks, and fell in love with big wilderness. And I was journalist enough to recognize that global warming was a big damn story. Most things I’ve written since have, in some often very tangential way, stemmed from the underlying premise of that book: that we were going to have to change pretty much everything in order to deal with it.
Gessner: I remember once attending a reading with you where Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez, among others, were speaking. Right down the street Wendell Berry was giving a reading. You commented: “If someone dropped a bomb they could wipe out a good percentage of America’s nature writers.” (That wasn’t really a lead in to a question—I just thought it was a funny line.) Anyway, with the Lopezes and Berrys properly enshrined, where does so-called nature writing go next? As a critic of environmental writing, as well as an environmental writer, I would think you would have as good an overview as anyone. One of the goals of this journal has been to reintegrate the genre with just plain writing? Do you see this happening already or in the future? Who are the younger writers in the genre that you find most interesting? What are the less hopeful and the more exciting developments?
McKibben: For the last few months I’ve been editing, in time I don’t really have, the Library of America anthology of American environmental writing. It’s been interesting to see the rhythms of it. The most important, Thoreau, was at the very start, and then there were sporadic pulses for a century: Muir and Burroughs, Leopold, Carson. After that things caught fire, and there’s been incredible writing ever since. But there’s plenty left to be done—the next metaphor is out there, waiting to be captured.
I’m launching a fellowship program in environmental journalism at Middlebury next fall, for early career journalists. They get a couple of weeks of training, and then they go back home with ten grand in research money for the year. We’re interpreting journalism pretty broadly—something to do with reporting—and also environmentalism. I think questions about economics, human culture and satisfaction, wealth and poverty, are all central. (They’re pretty much the subjects of my new book, Deep Economy.)
Gessner: Back to politics. We went to college together during the early Reagan years. Our generation was seen as politically apolitical compared to the one before. But my experience as a college professor tells me that we look like the Chicago Seven compared to students of today. Have you noted a similar apathy? Do you think it is destined to keep going in this direction or is it more cyclical? Will our current ‘50s have a ‘60s?
McKibben: I’m lucky. Middlebury is the most environmentally active college in the country. There are hundreds of kids with a passion for working on these issues, especially climate change, and they are ungodly hardworking and talented. And they seem to be finding allies around the country—there’s an awful lot of campus climate organizing going on.
At stepitup07.org we just got a photo from the Alpha Phi sorority chapter at the University of Texas Austin. 180 winsome girls smiling behind their “Cut Carbon 80% by 2050” banner. “We wanted to show it wasn’t just hippies who cared,” they wrote. Indeed!
Gessner: If we manage to stay on schedule, this journal could be coming out the same week as Step it Up. Could you tell us about the hopes and goals of this effort?
McKibben: To start a people’s movement about climate change. And to shift the debate on Capitol Hill in a more ambitious direction. And we’re succeeding.
