[GPRI] FW: Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change

[Greg Gerritt]

Come to the april 14 event at the Shepherd¹s building
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From: Sheila Dormody <sdormody at cleanwater.org>
Organization: Clean Water Action
Reply-To: Sheila Dormody <sdormody at cleanwater.org>
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:50:45 -0400
To: <dparrillo at cleanwater.org>, RICC <RIClimateCoalition at yahoogroups.com>
Cc: <ride1221 at yahoo.com>, <bekah at apeiron.org>, <zindzi_mccormick at brown.edu>,
<Deborah_Lipson at brown.edu>, <Carissa.Baquiran at planusa.org>,
<smckhann at cox.net>, <ccancro at cox.net>, <aarkway at ailt.org>,
<laura.brazee at planusa.org>, Greg Gerritt <gerritt at mindspring.com>
Subject: Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change

  <http://www.nytimes.com/>
    
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March 14, 2007
Renewing a Call to Act Against Climate Change
By FELICITY BARRINGER
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/felicity_barri
nger/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. ‹ Some are born earnest, some achieve earnestness, and some
have earnestness thrust upon them. Bill McKibben qualifies for inclusion in
at least two of these wedges of humanity.

In 1989, at the age of 28, he achieved earnestness of a dour, frowning sort
as one of the first laymen to warn of global warming
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?
inline=nyt-classifier>  in his book ³The End of Nature.² In the ensuing 18
years, he said recently while cross-country skiing in the woods near his
home, he felt caught in a bad dream, forever warning heedless people of a
monster in their midst.

Now, when Mr. McKibben is 46, his role as the philosopher-impresario of the
program of climate-change rallies called Step It Up, has thrust new
earnestness upon him. This time with a smile.

Mr. McKibben¹s title ‹ scholar in residence at Middlebury College ‹ seems
far too passive to encompass his current frenetic pace. His online call for
locally inspired, locally run demonstrations on April 14 has generated plans
for a wave of small protests under the Step It Up banner ‹ 870 and counting,
in 49 states (not South Dakota) ‹ to walk, jog, march, ski, swim, talk,
sing, pray and party around the idea of cutting national emissions of
heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050.

Skiers in Wyoming plan to descend a shrinking glacier. New Yorkers plan to
form an unbroken human line (dress code: blue shirts) along what might be
the new southern shoreline of Manhattan. A group of Dominican sisters and a
Wisconsin environmental group are organizing a conference on Sisinawa Mound
overlooking the Mississippi River.

³It¹s a source of eternal pleasure for me to turn on my computer every
morning and see what people have come up with the night before,² Mr.
McKibben said. ³Like: We¹re going to scuba dive with a banner off the
endangered coral reefs.² Or ³I¹m going to take my bar mitzvah and make it
into a Step It Up rally.²

But Mr. McKibben also noted in a column on the environmental Web site
Grist.org <http://grist.org/>  that popular momentum had lagged. ³We don¹t
have a movement,² he wrote. ³The largest rally yet held in the U.S. about
global warming drew a thousand people. If we¹re going to make the kind of
change we need in the short time left us, we need something that looks like
the civil rights movement, and we need it now. Changing light bulbs just
isn¹t enough.²

The rallies, organized online by a half-dozen Middlebury graduates (well,
one is still finishing his thesis) hunched over laptops in an otherwise bare
conference room in Burlington, could filter a kind of passion and fashion
reminiscent of the 1960s through a YouTube lens.

All the scattered ³actions,² as Mr. McKibben and Company are calling them,
are to be photographed, with the results put up on the Web on the evening of
April 14.

If one takes the social and political movements of the 20th century as a
template, of course, the climate-change movement has been doing things
completely out of order. Instead of the old sequence (call to arms,
demonstrations, politicians take note, legislation is passed, businesses and
communities come around, society internalizes the need for change), the big
demonstrations are coming late in the game, long after the call to arms.

There will be other demonstrations. On Tuesday, environmental groups are
busing people to Washington to buttonhole legislators on keeping oil and gas
drilling out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on cutting
emissions. On Friday, the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue will leave
Northampton, Mass. Then, on April 9, Laurie David, a producer of the Academy
Award-winning documentary ³An Inconvenient Truth,² and the singer Sheryl
Crow will begin a 12-city college tour.

Why is all this happening now?

³I think it¹s been too big for people to get their heads around,² Mr.
McKibben said. ³Those who wanted to do something did things at home ‹ your
car, your light bulb. Washington was blocked off for work for a long time.
People worked really hard at local levels.²

He takes it as a given that the Bush administration¹s strategy, working with
Asian nations, particularly China, on a voluntary basis on alternative
cleaner energy alternatives and setting goals for reducing the amount of
heat-trapping gases emitted per unit of gross domestic product is not going
to work.

Instead, Mr. McKibben said, ³only with national and then international
commitments are we going to get the scale of things we need done in the
small window of time the scientists say we¹re given.²

Van Jones, director the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland,
Calif., is one of relatively few black community organizers to find common
cause with those calling for drastic cuts in emissions from the country¹s
tailpipes and smokestacks. Such changes could make poor peoples¹ electrical
bills go up. But Mr. Jones says climate change will hit the poor first and
harder than any increase in their electricity.

³Two thousand seven is the year that global warming will become a marching
issue; 2008 is the year it will become a voting issue,² Mr. Jones said.
³McKibben is one of the main drivers in moving this thing from the cafes and
blogs into the streets.²

Mr. McKibben¹s proselytizing over the past two decades has not given him the
kind of profile enjoyed by Al Gore
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/al_gore/index.
html?inline=nyt-per> , the movement¹s American Idol. As a journalist and the
son of one (his father worked for The Boston Globe), Mr. McKibben is more
comfortable as a watcher than a climate preacher and more at home putting on
his boots in his mud room than standing behind a lectern.

Mr. McKibben drives a mud-splattered 2003 Honda Civic hybrid to and from the
home he and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, built in Ripton on land once
owned by the poet Robert Frost. They moved there and helped design the house
‹ which won an award from a state conservation group for energy efficiency ‹
because they wanted to send their only child, Sophie, 13, to a better school
than the one she was headed for in upstate New York and because of a
position at Middlebury College.

Mr. McKibben¹s 10 books and frequent articles in places like The New York
Review of Books have earned him the admiration of Steven Hayward, a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group.
³I don¹t think he¹s played as large a role as he deserves to have played,²
Mr. Hayward said. ³Serious and thoughtful people take him seriously.²

Well, maybe not entirely. To his Middlebury acolytes, he is Billy the Kibbs.
They admire his knowledge and passion but not his computer skills. They got
to know him in the college¹s dining halls. It was there last fall that Jon
Warnow, 22, suggested the name Step It Up for the Internet-connected
rallies. It was there that Will Bates, 23, started figuring out how to be
the quartermaster for last summer¹s five-day march across Vermont, which
begat the idea of a series of nationwide actions.

³It¹s fair to say we jumped into this without completely understanding where
it would end up,² Mr. McKibben added, looking around the little conference
room. 

Later, on a ski trail near his home, he mused about the sense of dread and
impotence that is no longer grafted onto his psyche. ³It¹s so different,² he
said. In the last year, he said, ³everything just changed.²

In a little more than three weeks, he hopes to have 870 pictures to prove
it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/science/14mckibben.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/science/14mckibben.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slo
gin> 
 
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: Sheila Dormody
: Rhode Island director | Clean Water Action
: 741 Westminster St., Providence RI 02903
: p: (401) 331-6972  f: (401) 331-7072
: mailto:sdormody at cleanwater.org
: http://www.cleanwateraction.org
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Clean Water Action is a national citizens' organization working for clean,
safe and affordable water, prevention of health-threatening pollution,
creation of environmentally-safe jobs and businesses, and empowerment of
people to make democracy work.
 
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