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A new reality for living on 'eaarth'
Bill McKibben
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Kai Ryssdal: Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham say they'll unveil their new climate change bill by next week sometime. But between health care and financial reform and a Supreme Court nomination, it could get kind of lost in the shuffle.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben says it's already too late to prevent global warming. What we have to do now is find a way to cope with our new reality. His new book is called "Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet." Bill, it's good to talk to you.
Bill McKibben: As always, Kai.
Ryssdal: This book, for those who can't see it out there, the title is "Eaarth" with the unconventional spelling of e-a-a-r-t-h. Help me out there.
McKibben: The conceit is that we really have built a new planet. Substantially different enough from the one that we were born onto to warrant a new name. This earth that we live on now has 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere than the one 50 years ago. Its oceans are turning steadily acid. We're seeing dramatic increases both in drought and in deluge, enough so that we've really begun to alter not only the ecological fabric of the planet but the economic fabric as well.
Ryssdal: It kind of feels on a day-to-day basis like the same old place.
McKibben: It does until something happens. I recount the story of our small town, and the fact that summer before last we had the two biggest rainstorms ever recorded there. That kind of storm is now happening in some place around the world every single day. This is a different world. It so far doesn't feel entirely different. It just feels a little different.
Ryssdal: So how do we recalibrate? Do we just get used to living smaller and less complicated and closer to home?
McKibben: Well, that's certainly part of it. We need to do two things. One, put a price on carbon so that we really begin to ween ourselves aggressively from fossil fuel. Even when we do that we'd be very wise to re-examine our economic life. Stop thinking constantly about expansion, and start thinking more about security. That implies getting away from too-big-to-fail, not just in banking, but in energy, in agriculture, and in almost everything we do.
Ryssdal: Take me through one of those big fixed investments that you spend some time on in the book: agriculture. How do we deconstruct that so that it becomes sustainable?
McKibben: Right now soil has become a kind of matrix for holding your corn upright while you apply fossil fuel. We need to get back to a very different kind of agriculture. One that's much more diverse and is much more localized. And that's beginning to happen, Kai. The fastest growing part of the food economy for the last decade has been local farmers' markets.
Ryssdal: I don't want to get all macroeconomic on you here, Bill. But just to go back to basic economics and Adam Smith, the opening lines of "Wealth of Nations," the book that he wrote, was consumption is the soul and purpose of all production. I mean that's why you have economies is to grow and get bigger.
McKibben: He didn't say that it's to grow forever getting bigger. In fact, he was pretty clear that there was a place at which that no longer made sense. What economists have failed to realize from the beginning, the economy is a subset of something else, and that something else is the natural world. There comes a point in which infinite growth no longer works. This is the moment finally when those limits are at hand.
Ryssdal: You're probably the last guy I need to tell this to. But there are fundamentally two responses to a book like this. One is to put your fingers in your ears, and say, la, la, la, because it's really just so depressing that you can't even comprehend. Or, as you say in the book, you go down into the basement, and you start oiling your guns because the apocalypse is nigh. What are you supposed to do about those responses?
McKibben: You know I've spent the last two or three years of my life organizing the largest scale global environmental movement we've seen. At the same time, I've been doing all kinds of work in the place where I live, in my town in Vermont. We need to work at that local scale and at that global. It's true that we've taken the sweet earth on which we were born and degraded it in pretty powerful ways. There's already damage. There will be more. So we better figure out how to live on the planet we have left.
Ryssdal: Bill McKibben's latest offering is a book called "Eaarth," that's e, double a, r, t, h. Bill, thanks a lot.
McKibben: Thank you, Kai, so much.
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Bill McKibben's wave length is almost perfect - and not because he makes the same arguments that I do in my 2009 study, "Gaia and the Fate of Midas: Wrenching Planet Earth" (University Press of America).
Here's the rub; Our drive to accumulate wealth by advancing the technological sphere in industry, agriculture, fishing, air travel -- and all else you can name --has so suffused the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, particle matter to which moisture clings, and deleterious gases galore that we have completely altered the biosphere.
Anthroprocenic activity - what we do every day just, it seems, to survive -- accommodates human-driven markets, fueling entropy (disorder) and inefficiencies and the safety of domesticated agriculture and other economic activity.
Long continued, folks, and the advancing technosphere will so unsettle the biosphere that, should local, regional and national entropies overlap -- nay merge -- Eaarth will face a dis-climax. That's mass extinction of our species and most others.
McKibben sees this future, hopes to stop the blinded drive for ever-more technological production, and asks up to wake up -- to change the direction of the current madness.
You snarky pooh-poohers really ought to read the book before you have much to say, because McKibben's facts will blow your assertions right out of the water. It's a devastating book—yet hopeful, if you believe, as I do, that human beings are generally at their best in a crisis. People rise to the occasion, whatever it is, with generosity and hard work and common sense. We can do it again, but we'd better get started.
The only reason not to read Eaarth is that you're afraid to know. C'mon, I double dare you.
The "amazing human efforts" that Derek Black mentions are already happening and will avert a "collapse". Thanks to people like Bill McKibbon, people around the globe are changing and getting involved. Also, the lack of a political solution has resulted in many people taking action in their own hands. I, amongst others,are fed up and this year purchased solar PV systems and now generate clean elecricity which we feed back into the grid. Others are starting to grow their own food. As Mahatma Gandi once said "be the change that you want to see in the world". This is the only solution.
I was delighted to hear Bill on the show as a much welcomed relief to business as usual. I would challenge Kai,his producers and NPR to air more of these kinds of stories-to play an active role in the hard work ahead to change the dominant economic paradigm to which more and more of the world is subscribing. I tire of reports of Wall Street and governmental policies that perpetuate more of the same. How about regularly featuring our cutting edge thinkers and entrepreneurs? Engage us as we listen to a dialog that has the capacity to transform business as usual, both literally and figuratively. You can play a powerful and active role in co-creating a better world--it beats oiling the guns or plugging your ears!
Kai, I do love your show! I listen regularly while I fix my family's nightly dinner. After spending 6 days in CA attending the Green Festival in SF - it was certainly a treat to come home to my little kitchen here in the sunny burg, turn on my radio and find you highlighting this story.... thanks for continuing to spread the green word!
I agree with the first post by "Mike". It is so obvious - the elephant in the room - but no one wants to talk about it - especially certain religious groups. Would God really have wanted one of the species she created to over power and dominate ALL the other beautiful creatures she dreamt up?
McKibben, just as most authors in this field, refused to sink his teeth into the real issue. Local trade and organic farming only work in depopulated western countries. There are inconcievable hordes of people beyond our shores, in such sublime density that the only way to feed them is to rape the land for diminishing chemically-induced returns. There is 1 and only 1 solution to climate change, and that's population control. Nothing else will work. Nothing else will effectively halt all other symptoms of climate change. Soil erosion? No problem, reduce the population to 500 million and there's less farming to be done. Carbon emissions? No worries. 500 million people can pick and choose where they live more effectively, or can be corralled by a well-meaning draconian eco-regime according to lowest Carbon output. Plastic waste? Tut tut, with 500 million people, you can indoctrinate them to recycle everything, or, frankly, just go back to glass, as sand's carbon footprint is low. Rising sea levels? No problem, 500 million people can move inland more easily than 7 billion. No government, and few writers, have the sheer Orwellian COJONES to tell it like it is. If you want to live a luxurious, consumptive lifestyle, your right to reproduce and replicate that lifestyle should be taken away. End of story. Reproduction, population and expansion are human rights, but they are now critical dangers to human survival. A world of Vermontians, ala' McKibben, will still have to confront population.
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