On Saturday, September 10^th, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org. spoke to the issue of global climate change at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Walnut Creek California.  Mr. McKibben should be a household word for all persons of any flavor who honor the Earth, and certainly for all Pagans for whom the Earth is sacred.    

Mr McKibben has written 14 books on the Earth, the Environment and People’s interactions with it. His first was published in 1989 titled “The End of Nature”.    He is an activist who walks his talk and, in fact had just been released from four days in jail after protesting the government’s failure to take action in the face of the alarming rate of global climate change. 

An excellent speaker with hard facts and a sense of humor, his talk, more than any evidence that I have heard in some time brought home the terrible urgency of our planetary situation.  He explained with simple clarity how climate change brings about both drought and flooding, how it affects the global market for commodities driving food prices up, and how it is directly responsible for the millions in third world countries who are mal-nourished.  

His latest protest involved many older citizens.  When trying to determine a median age, rather than be rude by asking how old they were he asked instead “who was President when you were born?” The greatest number of answers were Truman and FDR with WWII vets in attendance.  “After all” he said” “we are the ones who have been pouring CO2 into the atmosphere the longest.  It just doesn’t seem right to put the eighteen year olds out for cannon fodder.”  One eighty-two year old who was arrested had a sign around his neck that said “WWII vet, handle with care”.

He was clear that we knew everything that we needed to know back in 1989 when he wrote his first book. We just didn’t know how fast CO2 was going to change the balance of nature.  He supplied us with such examples as the fact that the oceans are 30% more acid than they were thirty years ago.  The polar caps are now 40% smaller than they were .  2010 set all time new temperature records.  In Pakistan the temperature was 129 degrees setting an all time Asian record.  The volume of Arctic Sea ice is at its lowest point ever.  The atmosphere is 4% wetter than it was ten years ago. Russia had several days of 100% weather which had never happened before combined with the worst drought they had ever had.  They did not export their crops and they are one of the four largest exporters of grains in the world.  This drove up prices that continue today.  Because of this the number of mal-nourished people in the world has spiked in the last few years. 

He spoke of the floods in the eastern United States and watching covered bridges that had stood for two hundred years floating away because in one year they broke the previous all time rain fall record by two inches. He mentioned that fire fighters in Texas stated that no one had ever fought fires as bad as those they faced last year due to the droughts there.

All of this, he states in his latest book, is because we no longer live on the same planet. This new planet he has named  Eaarth –

Bill McKibben on his book, Eaarth

http://www.billmckibben.com/eaarth/eaarthbook.html#praise  

“Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We’ve created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.”

Here are excerpts from Eaarth:

“One hundred eleven hurricanes formed in the tropical Atlantic between 1995 and 2008, a rise of 75 percent over the previous thirteen years….

Already the ocean is more acid than anytime in the last 800,000 years, and at current rates by 2050 it will be more corrosive than anytime in the past 20 million years…

We’re not…going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue. We’re like the guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either.”

He believes that there is an ethical issue here in that we in the USA represent 4% of the population and are responsible for about 40% of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Further, he continued we are only at the start.  Within this century, if we do not take immediate action, we will increase the mean temperature by 5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.  For every degree of increase we will lose ten percent of our grain production world wide.   A bleak picture indeed as the implications are mass starvation and eventual die off. Ultimately he maintains, the human population cannot survive this rate of increase

“In Washington” he says, “we’ve had a perfect 20 year record of bi-partisan efforts to do nothing.” In fact he believes that in fact the oil companies are working hard to block any efforts to take action.

“As the scientists here in the United States are talking calmly into the ear of our politicians, the oil companies are bellowing into the other ear with dire threats.” In Europe while they move ahead we are falling behind.”

This is a global problem and will necessarily need to be solved globally, but we run into a real problem with language.  He gave the example of Cokes old tag line “Coke adds life” translates in Chinese into “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.”   Where do we start?  His web site – http://www.350.org/ is exactly the same in any language, and so he started this organization with seven folks.  Since there were seven continents he felt that this was a good start – one person for each. Now they have had 5,100 demonstrations in 180 countries.  He pointed out that there is a fundamental fallacy in the statement that environmentalism is a luxury for the rich and urged the audience to go to 350.org to look at the pictures there and see that the majority of people are young people from third world countries where they live closer to the Earth and feel the pressure of climate change more profoundly.  

Finally, he told the audience that he would be back in the Bay Area for “Moving the Planet” day at Justin Herman Plaza in San Francisco at Noon on Saturday, September 24 –

http://www.moving-planet.org/   

I will be covering this event for PNC Bay Area.

 Please take the time to explore his site and become acquainted 350.org.  I found his talk both enlightening and hopeful in that we can make a difference before its too late.

Other Books by Bill McKibben

http://www.billmckibben.com/books.html

 Greg Harder for PNC Bay Area