By Dot Bergin
Speaking to a packed house at First Parish in Bedford on May 31, environmental activist Bill McKibben (350.org) painted a dire picture of the future of the planet unless bold measures are taken within a very short time to reduce burning of fossil fuels. Despite the gloomy outlook, McKibben offered renewables – solar and wind power – as an entirely plausible and workable solution to the energy problem. What is required, he said, is the will to challenge large corporations, politicians, and powerful special interest groups to bring about change. Citizens need to “go the barricades” now, before it is too late.
In his introduction, John Gibbons, Senior Minister of First Parish said, “Bill McKibben is not a polite environmentalist: he connects income inequality, the disparities between the global north and south, the California water crisis, the India heat waves, the death throes of the coal industry, the frackers building the Kinder Morgan pipeline (you know that most of your so-called natural gas comes from fracked sources?), and the fact that the air we breathe here in Bedford is so much cleaner than the air that is choked upon in Roxbury. Our democracy is choking on environmental inequity.
“Bill is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College. He was awarded the 2013 Gandhi Peace Prize. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages…. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized 20,000 rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.”
McKibben began his talk in a philosophical vein: we are accustomed to thinking of time as a predictable quantity. Now we need to think differently of time. We’ve left behind the Holocene era – a benign period of climate stability; we’re in a new set of time. We’ve just now seen epic rains in Texas and Oklahoma; the snowpack in the California’s Sierra Nevada is down to zero; vicious heatwaves have struck India and the air pollution in its major cities is deadly, taking a high toll on the health of children. The point is: the heat wave is now the exception not the rule. In his view, we have a very short period of time to take corrective action. If by the end of the century the temperature of the earth has risen 8 degrees, the plant will not be worth living on. “This isn’t a mystery, ”McKibben, said, “yet reaction to this crisis has been painfully slow.
“Our job is to defeat the forces that want us to move slowly.” He pointed to some recent successes: in the past two months, both Oxford University and the Church of England have announced they would divest their investments in fossil fuels. Importantly, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (officially the Government Pension Fund Global), the world’s richest sovereign wealth fund, recently divested from 22 companies because of their high carbon emissions: 14 coal miners, five tar sand producers, two cement companies and one coal-based electricity generator. On college campuses, Stanford University is a leader in the divestment movement. Harvard University is thus far resisting, although McKibben and students have recently led protests there.
Bill McKibben has been in this fight for more than 25 years. Does he hold out some hope for the planet’s future? The answer is a resounding “yes.” Pointing to the recent drop in the price of solar panels, McKibben said connecting to the electric grid isn’t necessary: “We can skip over fossil fuels and do solar across the world.” Another positive step is Elon Musk’s development of a home storage battery, which can make off-the-grid solar homes feasible.
A lively Q & A session followed McKibben’s talk. His final words: “We are at a moment when we can bend time. How to speed this up? Build movements! Movements are how change happens.” And he urged older citizens to join forces with students, who are now in the forefront of the climate action movement.
McKibben’s appearance at First Parish was made possible by the church’s “Spirit of Democracy Fund,” established to honor the late Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, former minister of First Parish, who died three years ago at the age of 94. Each year a distinguished speaker is invited to First Parish to speak on an issue critical to our democratic society.
Who was Jack Mendelsohn? As Rev. Gibbons said in his introduction, “Jack ministered in Indianapolis and Rockford, Illinois, and Boston at the Arlington Street Church, and Chicago (where he faced down the police Red Squads), and then here in Bedford where he shook a lot of you up. Jack was a liberal lion, perhaps the most distinguished Unitarian, then Unitarian Universalist minister of the 20th century. He went into ministry because he wanted liberal religion to be sensible and not stupid in relationship to modernity, in relationship to science and politics and democracy.”
Once the service ended, Evan Seitz, First Parish’s “inside agitator / climate justice coach” and Marla Markham led a fully-subscribed public narrative workshop to help environmental enthusiasts decide whether to become active environmental organizers, doing more than reading emails and attending meetings or rallyes arranged by others. The pair demonstrated the power of story in converting interest to action. They cited three types of stories – the story of self, the story of us and the story of now – as a path for moving interested individuals beyond apathy and inertia and into environmental action.
.
Watch Crisis and Opportunity, the 2015 Spirit of Democracy service, with Bill McKibben at First Parish, Unitarian Universalist, in the historic meeting house on Bedford Common
.
Loading ...
