NOFA 2007 Summer Conference Keynote by Bill McKibben

transcribed by Marianne Radke, Julie Rawson, and Becca Buell

Thank you, thank you all, it's great fun to be here, but the main purpose of after dinner speech is to give oneself time to digest before the dancing begins. I won't be insulted if you nap a little bit, during this talk. But it's a great honor and a great pleasure for me to get to be here.

As I was driving down today I was just kind of thinking about all of the images over the years that NOFA and organic farming in this part of the world conjure up in my mind, and all the good friends and all the good times from the all local Berkeley College dining hall at Yale to good times up in Unity, Maine, to the food project out side Boston, to all our old and dear friends at Sam and Elizabeth Smith's Caretaker farm, to long evenings in the Grange Halls in northern NY, to all the glories of Organic Vermont where I hang out at the moment.

I was thinking just about last week being camped with a bunch of kids who I'll tell you about in a while at Nesenkeag Farm, in Litchfield, New Hampshire, talking with Eero Ruutila, the farmer there. He was talking about being a NOFA Certifier at the very beginning of all this long ago. All of those people and many people in this room are among my real heroes in the world. You've built something powerful and something precious over the last few decades, which leads me to the first thing that I want to say tonight.

I'm starting tonight with the very good news -- which is that you're winning. It's hard for people who start out on the fringe of things to sense when they've moved into the main stream and when they've begun. in fact, to define the future. But that's where y'all are, or we are in now in some ways, all of a sudden.

I shared a stage earlier this year with my greatest of all writing heroes and old friend, Wendell Berry. We were down in Kentucky, and one of the things that I got to say to him was what a pleasure it was for me that he had lived long enough to see the sort of things that he had begun talking about thirty and forty years ago become not the kind of distant dream or a possibility or a theoretical idea but something that is defining what the future is going to look like.

We have hit nadir with our food system and now we are on the upswing. Y'all are no longer on the defensive, whether you know it or not, you're on the offensive. And change is coming your way and reacting to you and following your lead. Now, this is still the beginning of that trend and so some of the evidence for it is mostly anecdotal. You can tell because every time you pick up a magazine in this country, a food magazine or a lifestyle magazine or anything, all of the articles all of a sudden are about local food. And about new ways of eating and about new ways of thinking. You can tell because, when I was talking on the phone not long ago with my friend Jack Lazer of Butterworks Farm up in northern Vermont, one of the great farmers in all of New England, he said that his only problem at the moment was that there were so many localvores now in Vermont. Word had gotten out that he made forty or fifty gallons of sunflower oil and they were sort of beating down his door, demanding that he sell them a gallon of local cooking oil.

But it's not just anecdotal. The numbers are starting to show the same thing. If you look at the places where this movement is strong, and where it sunk its first roots, in the last agricultural census in the state of Oregon, the number of farms doubled. Its been a long time since anyplace in this country has the total number of farms going steadily up instead of steadily down.

In Vermont we're still losing dairy farms because commodity dairy is a pretty hard business to make a go of. But in Chittenden County, Vermont, around our biggest city, last year the total number of farms grew 19 percent. It's not all people who are making a full time living off of it, but it's all people serving that local market, and there's way more demand. There was an article in the Burlington Free Press a month or two ago saying that the number of people wanting CSA shares who couldn't get them was at least 5 or 6 or 7 hundred families. You know there's lots and lots of room for that to grow.

Farmers Markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy in America. Sales are up 12 to 15% a year. It's growing a hell of a lot faster than Wal-Mart is growing. (Audience laughs) We haven't quite caught up to Wal-Mart, but they're looking over their shoulder!

One way you can tell that you're winning is that the other side is starting to get scared. There was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times three days ago where someone from the New Zealand Lamb Industry was trying very hard to argue that it made more sense in terms of fuel use to be shipping lamb from New Zealand, than growing it locally. They were comparing it, interestingly enough, to the kind of industrial lamb that you can grow in this country. When they did the calculation that way -- the worst possible way you can in this country -- then it might well work, but of course that's not the comparison people are making anymore. People are starting to understand that lamb can come from their neighbors, and that all food can come from the people around us the way that it has for all of American history until fifty years ago and for all of human history until fifty years ago and for eighty percent of the people who live on this planet now.

Our short experiment with something very odd and different is coming to an end. And it's coming to an end quickly. Part of the reason it's coming to an end is that you guys have been doing an amazing job, and part of the reason has very little to do with you. Which is that the other side, the system of industrial agriculture that we built in this country, carried to its logical extent, turns out be a bizarre disaster. (Laughter). We're only now beginning to realize that because, you know, whatever you do seems normal, and that seemed normal to America for a while. But we're beginning to really understand what the cost of that is.

I got to share the stage earlier this year with Michael Pollan, who's another old friend of mine and who has been doing this work for a long time. Journalistically, he was saying, all of a sudden, he's no longer having to explain to his editors what it is that he's talking about. People had begun to really catch on, begun to catch onto the idea that industrial agriculture has ruined rural communities, that it has caused unbelievable environmental damage, which I will get back to. And that it has left us a nation of puffy people.

Demographers say that the life expectancy in America, in the next couple of years, may actually begin to fall, for the first time in this century, because we have become so unbelievable unhealthy on the diet that we eat. One in three people born in New York City this year will develop type 2 diabetes in the course of their lives. It's the new normal in the industrial food system that we have developed. In fact, that industrial food system provides a pretty good picture of itself in the animals that it grazes. Just like the swine that it raises -- two and a half million at a time in huge corporate farms -- it's extremely productive, but its increasingly unable even to move about.

There's a sense in which industrial agriculture is being revealed all of a sudden to be something like the old Soviet Union. Rotten from within, entirely dependent upon subsides from the centralized element, and kind of waiting for a shove to collapse. A shove which has been coming from a lot of different directions -- probably most importantly from the fact that it can no longer rely on the absolutely cheap input of fossil fuel very much further into the future.

Now it won't come down in a day, it's a pretty big and pretty powerful model. If the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons, this system has lobbyists. They'll be able to delay its fall. This year's Farm bill was not all that exciting or interesting. It will cushion for a while longer the sort of current way of doing business. But this fall farm bill people were actually looking at it and commenting on it, taking action on it and beginning to really think about and challenge it, and it won't be long before even the central government of this country is beginning to catch up to this message and beginning to spur this transition.

It's happening and its happening fast. And one of the best pieces of news is, because of this sense of movement toward local, real, food, we're now seeing that idea start to spread to other spheres and spread pretty quickly. The idea, the possibility of localizing large parts of our economy becomes more real and more possible with each passing day. Not just in food, look at spheres such as energy. Just in the same way that we're used to thinking of Cargill or Archer Daniels Midland, as our kind of calorie brokers in this country, so are we used to thinking of Exxon Mobile and Peabody Cole as our BTU or our electron brokers. But we're beginning very fast, and with all kinds of interesting legislation and policy shift and good local work, to figure out how we might begin to build the equivalent of Farmer's Markets and CSA's in energy, too.

I have solar panels on my roof on my house in Vermont but I'm not off the grid. I'm very determinately on the grid. I want to be my own little utility on a sunny day like it was in Vermont today. I want to be firing electrons down the grid. I love to watch my meter spin the wrong way, to know that my neighbor is keeping his beer cold off the sunlight falling on my roof. And if you think about that system for all the same reasons that we do it with food, forget its environmental impacts which I will return to, because it's a good way to deploy environmentally benign technology, but its also a way to build systems which are durable enough to catch some kind of future.

Just like with food, you have to be an unbelievable optimist to believe that the system we are relying on for the moment is going to last all that much further into the future. Think about it: what it is at the moment that we depend on with electricity. We depend on convincing people in West Virginia and Kentucky to blow the tops off their mountains and give us cheap coal. Think about what we depend on for mobility; we depend on spending young people -- Vermont's lost more people per capita in the War in Iraq than any state in the union. The current system depends on sending people to guard the 5000 mile straw from which we drink hydrocarbons from the Persian Gulf.

It's beautiful to think about a system that instead works like the internet, or a farmer's market, where all kinds of us are putting in energy and taking it out, just like we're bringing food to the market and bringing other food home. It's even spread to things like currency. There's all of a sudden a big explosion in people trying to figure out how to take more and more and more of their economies into their hands. I was a little ways west of here three weeks ago for a celebration to mark the millionth Berkshare in circulation, that local currency. For those of you who haven't seen them, they're absolutely gorgeous. And it was for the most part people who had tried this experiment before it kind of foundered in a small ghetto of vegan restaurants and politically correct masseuses. But this one spread beyond that, and it was pretty amazing to be able to go to the Mr. Ding-a-ling truck and buy an ice cream bar with a Berkshare, and get change back in Berkshares, and realize that the possibilities are expanded at an enormous rate.

Why is this happening. Well one of the reasons is that we have begun to sense all those vulnerabilities. Because we have begun to realize how irresponsible it is to depend on taking things from other countries and how unlikely it is that it will last all that much longer. Peak oil, the idea that we're beginning to run out of that magic fuel that has powered our economy for two centuries, was a real slap upside the head in a lot of ways for Americans. That sense that we couldn't depend on things to just keep rolling forward for another generation in the ways that we have gotten used to.

We can't do that, it's not an option anymore. And we begin to sense the flimsiness of all these arrangements. Its pretty shocking to turn on the radio today and listen as the federal reserve bank pumps money by the tens of billions of dollars into the capital market to try and keep it from melting down because we have built so many crappy houses that no one can afford to buy; and mortgaged ourselves to the hilt with stuff that we're going to be desperate to get rid of.

So that vulnerability and that insecurity is one part of the reason why we are moving suddenly and quickly in this direction and that all kinds of people are beginning to feel this move. But there's another reason too, and its just as interesting, and in a way, more interesting and maybe more profound. The one real, maybe one biggest, lie of the kind of growth economy über-consumer capitalism that we've built since WWII in this society, the one real lie is that it was going to make us spectacularly happy.

And it turns out as we begin to look at it -- this was part of the burden of a book of mine, Deep Economy -- that that just isn't true. For a long time, we had no way of assessing this. Academics stayed away from the business of trying to decide whether or not people were happy, even though it seemed like a kind of basic-bottom-line question, maybe the basic-bottom-line question. It also seems too soft for them. They had no way to know, in any confidence, that if you asked people: "Are you satisfied with your life?" that the answer would mean anything. It was viewed as just too wimpy a question. Instead we were left with the economist's proxy: the concept of utility, the idea that you could tell what satisfied people by what they bought. And that served as our basic proxy in this era of Neoclassical economics.

It's the reason, more than anything else, that we fixate on the idea that we have to grow the GDP at an enormous rate each year, because surely it has something to do with the world getting better and better. In the last few years, academics have actually tried to figure out whether that's true or not. And it actually began with the economists, including some pretty prominent ones: Daniel Kahneman from Princeton for instance, who won the Nobel four years ago in economics.

Big economists began to try and study this question in grim dismal ways. The first study that Kahneman talks about in his big book on this involved interrupting people every ten seconds while they were undergoing colonoscopies to ask them how they were feeling. "How are you feeling now!"

But over five or six years, economists, psychologists, and sociologists did an immense amount of research and began to build up an impressive body of data to show that in fact subjective sense of wellbeing was a robust phenomena. If I asked you, Are you satisfied? The answer you give correlates with a lot of things we can measure: how people view you, certain things in your brain chemistry that are scientifically verifiable.

Once people had decided that this was a question worth asking, then they could look at what data there was lying around. And some of it is pretty powerful stuff. For instance, every year since WWII, one of the big polling firms in this country has asked Americans flat out, "Are you satisfied with your life?" The number of Americans who say, "I am very satisfied with my life," peaks in 1956, and goes slowly but steadily down ever since. Barely a quarter of Americans will make that claim, which is very odd because in that same fifty-year period, our average standard of living, the amount of stuff that we have, has almost tripled. We live in infinitely bigger houses, we take far more vacations, we can get any food on earth, any vaguely musical sound emitted anywhere on the planet can be bought and paid for instantly, and we have appliances that no one had ever thought of fifty years ago.

If the economy worked the way that we had intuitively believed it does, those two curves should go in something like the same direction. They wouldn't go exactly the same way, but at least the same direction. The fact that they diverge like that is very odd and very unsettling. And the question is, why are they diverging? Why would we become less satisfied with our lives? And the answer, so far as we can tell, is not mere coincidence. It is that past a certain point, there are things inherent in affluence that lead to a kind of dissatisfaction. And the thing that's mainly inherent in that affluence is a loss of connection with each other, a loss of community.

Think about what Americans spent money on since the end of WWII. More than anything else what we spent money on was building suburbs. Building bigger houses farther apart from each other. In the year 1900, the average American lived on the same acre with eight other people. By the year 2000, the density of the new subdivisions of America was two people per acre. There's just less chance that we are going to run into each other, just mathematically in the course of the day.

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise to us that the average American has half as many close friends as we did fifty years ago. That we spend way less than half as many evenings eating dinner with friends or family or relatives than we did fifty years ago. Those are very large changes for an evolved social animal. And it turns out that there are bigger changes than whatever benefit we got from having more access to more stuff along the way.

And it turns out that the same phenomenon can be observed if you look for it, all over the place. Past per capita income of about $10,000 a year in our dollars, so forty thousand dollars for a family of four, there's no longer any correlation in any place around the world between increase in income and satisfaction with life. The results just scatter all over the place after that. The correlation that does exist when you're very poor, and have your basic needs met by more, disappears once you've reached that point. Instead you begin to hunger for something else.

Now, of course the trap is, once you've started down that line, it's hard to get out of it. You get more and more used to the kind of privatized life that we now lead, the sort of hyper individualistic life that Americans have built. Maybe some of you saw a story in the Times about two months ago, that I thought was one of the most revelatory stories I've seen in a long time. It set out to answer the question of what's in those houses the size of junior high schools that people have recently built. It turns out that one of the things that's in them -- and not just in them, but now standard in upscale subdivision housing of just the kind that is currently causing our credit markets to collapse -- is dual master bedrooms. That is to say the new trend is, the husband snores, or the wife steals the blankets or whatever, and the way that we solve this is to add nine-hundred square feet to the house. There's something kind of tragic about it if you've spent much time in the developing world, and you know if people are lucky enough to have one bed in the house, there's going to be four people in it and nobody is worried about who's snoring. There's also something just kind of tragic and lonely about it. This idea that in the most affluent society that there ever was on the face of the earth, people are hunkered down in their little caves, peering out across the hallway at their mates. There's something kind of horrifying about it.

And I think what it means that here too we've reached a kind of nadir and we're beginning to go the other direction. Why are people going to Farmer's Markets in such huge numbers? Part of it is because they want delicious food, good food that's good for them and local food and they understand the environmental benefits and all that. But that's only part of it. A couple of years ago, a pair of sociologists followed shoppers - first around supermarkets, and then around farmer's markets. You all have been to the supermarket, you all know that drill backwards and forwards. You walk in, a white trance overtakes you, you visit the "stations of the cross" around the perimeter of the market, you emerge with the same basket of stuff you had the week before. Dare I say, I think this happens even at Whole Foods. When they followed the shoppers around farmer's markets, they found them having, on average, ten times more conversations per visit. Ten times! These are social scientists. They are used to parsing whether the .18 percent increase of something is statistically significant. Ten times! An order of magnitude more interchange and connection and involvement in community.

It's not like it was a different way of picking up your calories for the week. It was an entirely different human experience. And not surprisingly enjoyable, because it's the same human experience that people have been having since agriculture began. That's how people have shopped forever. They have gone to the market, and seen the vendors, seen their friends and talked among themselves, and brought food there, and taken food home. And it corresponds with something deep inside of us. Which is why we like that.

So, in one sense, it seems to me that all of the news is good. That we are beginning to figure things out, that this kind of odd experiment in the last fifty years of this country has seen the kind of furthest reach of its penetration and now its time for the pendulum to swing slowly and patiently in the other direction. And for us to kind of resume how normal human life began. Paul Hawken, in this magnificent new book, Blessed Unrest, talks about how all around the world, in one area, in one thing after another, people are doing this same work, bringing us back from these bizarre excesses of corporate and globalizing and dehumanizing systems. And it's very, very inspiring to read it and it makes one profoundly optimistic in all sorts of ways.

But, and you knew that there would be a but, there is one deal breaker, one game stopper, and that's what I will be talking about for the rest of this talk. And that's the one problem that's so large and infringing on us so fast, that unless we are able to do something about it very dramatically, and very quickly, there's not going to be a way for that pendulum to swing smoothly back in the direction that it needs to go for us to resume the normal course of human affairs.

And here I am talking about climate change, about global warming. About the field where I have spent the last twenty or so years working. I won't belabor the science with you tonight. Suffice to say that really the only thing that has changed in the twenty years since I began this work is that we understand now that both the magnitude and the pace of this problem is larger than we had guessed. And that's because we didn't fully understand the system twenty years ago, the physical system of the whole earth because no one had really done this experiment before. So far, human beings on this earth have increased the temperature little more than one degree Fahrenheit, about 59 degrees to about 60 degrees, global average. We would have predicted, twenty years ago, that that would be bringing us just now to the beginnings of the greenhouse era. And that the real destruction would still be another degree, and hence another few decades in the future.

It turns out the system was more finely balanced than we realized. And that there are all kinds of positive feedback effects that start happening once you tip the system a little way. And the scale of those feedback effects turn out to be truly enormous.

Just to give you an example, and there are many examples, but one the easiest and most obvious is what's going on as the sea ice begins to melt in the arctic. This is not the big pack ice over Greenland or the west Antarctic which I'll talk about in a minute. That ice, when it melts, will raise the sea level. But that pack ice, that extent of white, which you see from any satellite picture of the earth, that's been there for a very long time, that's melting extraordinarily fast now.

There's a story that came out today on the wires about this years extensive melting, that scientists who last year had reported by far the largest extent of that melting , said today that this year's melting, in the words of one, was something truly incredible and beyond anything we could have imagined. We are now thinking that by summer 2020, there may be no ice in the arctic. That those satellite pictures will not show a white cap on top of the planet, but merely blue in the summer.

And what does that mean? Well one thing that it certainly proves is that the planet is warming, but it also helps amplify that warming. There used to be a beautiful white mirror across the top of the earth that reflected 80% of the sun's rays back out to space. They hit the ice bounce. You all know how bright it is on a sunny winter day. When you replace that with blue water, it absorbs eighty percent of that incoming solar radiation. And it just begins to amp up this reaction, and there are similar things going on in forests and in soils, and in permafrost, and on and on and on, and in all of the big physical systems of this planet, and all taking us in the same direction.

The effects are beginning, not beginning but are showing up profoundly around the earth, in places that we can see very easily. Just in the last few weeks, the United Kingdom has suffered the worst flood in the very long recorded history of the United Kingdom. The same in south Asia, where the usual, wonderful, life giving monsoon has turned into something monstrous that is flooding people by the tens of millions out of their homes. The western US, about half the country, had the warmest July on record, in many places by about 3 and 4 degrees. This change is stunning already, and that's with a one-degree rise in temperature. The consensus of all of the computer models is that unless we take very swift action, very soon, what we will see in the course of this century is another five degrees rise in temperature, to about 65 degrees, which will make it far warmer than it has been, since before human evolution began -- before there were primates wandering around on this planet. All of the consequences of that are grim, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. Suffice it to say the horseman of the apocalypse, famine, war, pestilence, all those things become far more likely, and more dangerous, going forward.

It's also possible that we're nearing red lines across which the level of catastrophe is so large we don't even want to entertain the possibility of going there. We used to think that those big ice sheets above the west Antarctic and Greenland were stable on a century or so time scale; that we could start melting them now, but it would take a very long time for it to happen. Because it's a mile and half thick sheet of ice, there's a lot if inertia in all that ice. How would you go about melting it? The computer models assumed, as it got warmer, there would be a little surface melt and it would politely evaporate off into the atmosphere. It turns out that's not what's happening. As you melt that surface layer, the water is quickly finding its way down to the bottom of those great ice sheets, and they are greasing the skids for their slide into the ocean.

James Hanson, the NASA scientist, testified recently in a court case in Vermont against the nation's auto manufacturers and he said that in his opinion that it is conceivable in this century that we might see rises in the sea level on the order of twenty feet. We had, three days ago, a wicked thunderstorm in New York City where it rained for 24 hours and shut down the entire subway system because it was all flooded out. Think about what 20 feet of sea level does for almost every coastal city on this planet.

And the truly depressing thing is that our political system so far has not reacted to the situation. We haven't begun to take any of the steps that would do anything about the kind of scale of the problem that we are addressing. You know from your own work what sort of changes we need. I was sitting in a camp the other day with a group of kids that were doing this climate march across New Hampshire at Nesenkeag Farm and Eero Ruutila was telling us about the fact that he has seen three fifty-year storms in the last twenty months, okay? It's been flooded out completely. The number of storms that have dumped more than two inches over this period, or real gully washers, has increased about 25% at this latitude from the level of 1970.

Are there any farmers here who enjoy 2 inch rainfalls over the course of a day? Not too many, because it is not what we need and it is not what our systems have evolved to deal with. We need to figure out very quickly how to spark the transformation away from a fossil fuel economy and towards one that the world can live with. I can talk for a long time about all the kind of engineering solutions that we might head towards and that sort of thing. I'm not going to do that. I want to talk only about what you can to do to make those things possible, because they are possible, you know.

Twenty years ago, when environmentalists talked about renewable power, they did it with their fingers crossed, okay, because it wasn't ready for prime time yet. There are some in this room who were willing to be down in the basement with a wrench figuring out how to top off the batteries; but it wasn't going to happen on the kind of scale that we needed. But now it can, now we know-I mean there was a story in the Economist magazine, that left-wing rag, last week talking about people who have figured out that with wind created across Europe -- because it is always windy somewhere in Europe - they can provide enough power for the continent from wind alone. It's possible. It's not the technology, it's not the engineering, that's lacking. What's lacking is the political will. And my work now increasingly has less and less to do with writing and more and more and more to do to with trying to figure out how to summon that kind of political will quickly enough to make something happen.

Let me tell you a couple of stories, just quickly. Right about this time last year I had been in Tibet and in far northern India, in the Himalayan portions of India, doing a story for National Geographic and for Harpers, some reporting. Of course probably a lot of you have been to Tibet once upon a time, and as you know almost every time you turn a corner in the road you see in the distance some pilgrim prostrating themselves along the road, doing the full prostration one after another on the six or eight or ten month trip to Lhasa or Mount Kailash or wherever it is that they are going. And then I was in, as I say, rural India, in a village in India, where if you are paying attention it's impossible not to keep coming across the tracks of Gandhi and the Gandhian movements and that kind of legacy.

When I got back to Vermont, I was thinking. I think that all those images were in my head in my real despair about how little we were doing political around this problem -- and remember this time last year we still had James Inhofe of Oklahoma chairing the relevant Senate Committee, a man who invited as the only witness to last years Global Warming hearings in the US Senate, the novelist Michael Crichton to explain that global warming was a hoax. In my despair about all that, I just said: 'Well, I have to do something even if it's sort of pointless.' So I called up a couple of my friends, one of them the wonderful Vermont writer John Alder and said: 'Look, let's walk up to Burlington -- I was thinking about all those pilgrims -- and we'll do a sit-in on the steps of the Federal Building and we'll get arrested. There will be some kind of story in the paper and it'll maybe not do anything, but maybe it'll do something. But at least we will have had the satisfaction of having taken some action, you know, kicked off something and from little acorns grow great oaks and on and on and on.'

John's a writer like me and a good guy, and said: 'Okay, I'll come with you.' We talked to a few more people and thank god one of them, doubtless one of the young people from Middlebury where I work, had the good sense to call up to the police in Burlington and ask what would happen if we did this. The police said nothing would happen; you can sit on the steps of the Federal Building as long as you want. As I said before, they kind of implied that we would need to burn down the Federal Building. So we calculated the carbon emissions from that… and quickly recalibrated and instead just started telling people we were going to do this walk, this kind of pilgrimage, up the west side of Vermont.

We left on a Wednesday, I guess, from Robert Frost's old summer writing cabin in the Green Mountains because we liked that most clichéd of all high school English poems about the road not taken, you know it seemed very apropos. And for five days we walked and we camped at night in farmers' fields. Wonderful, some of the time. We got to a new farm in Ferrisburg where a fellow was growing grain and just built a clay oven and he was happily making pizza for however many of us there were there. The few first days it started with about three hundred of us and by the Sunday, five days later, when we got to Burlington, there were about a thousand people marching, which for Vermont is actually a lot of people. It was the biggest political demonstration in Vermont for a very long time.

It was very interesting and very instructive. It was more than enough people to get every single person who was running for office in Vermont last fall -- all our federal candidates -- to come meet with us. And not just people you would expect to be champions like Bernie Sanders. In fact Bernie loves organizing more than anything, activism of all kinds, and came running up to us as we were coming into Burlington, saying: 'This is great, this is great, I've never seen this many people, this is so great, what is this about again?' And he's turned into the greatest champion on this issue in the US Senate.

But we've got all these guys here and then we said, look, we don't want to just hear that you are sad about global warming. Here are the things we think would be good to do: we'd like to see carbon emissions in this country cut 80% by 2050, and we'd like to see 40 mpg cars soon, and before you talk to the thousand of people gathered here, we'd like to give you a chance to sign on to the bottom of this big sheet of cardboard that we're carrying around. And we slightly loaded the dice by giving the magic marker to the youngest kid who walked all five days, all fifty or sixty miles with us and he handed it to each one of them as they got up. And they all signed including the conservative Republicans who were running for office. There was a woman named Martha Rankin who was running on the GOP ticket for Congress, who actually came very close to winning. And she had said in her announcement speech two months before that she wasn't sure that global warming was real and that more research needed to be done. It turns out, and this is something to really understand, it turns out that this more research that needed to be done was how many people would walk across Vermont who believe this. Bless her heart. She signed onto that thing and then she campaigned on it all full on. In fact, her TV commercials showed her signing it; they Photoshopped out all the other candidates.

It worked the way it was supposed to work. And it was great, by the way, to have this support of the Vermont agricultural and farming community all the way along. And to have people flooding in on this day from places like the Intervale. one of the great cases in this entire nation, on 120 acres in the center of Vermont, growing something like 10% of all the fresh food that people in Vermont's largest city eat. Not a fringe, not an experiment, not a pilot, absolutely at the center of how the world is going.

The only depressing note was to pick up the paper the next morning and read a story saying that that thousand people who gathered on the edge of Lake Champlain might have been the biggest demonstration about global warming that had yet taken place in this country. At first that seemed unlikely but I thought about it and indeed I think it was sort of true, that we built a kind of super structure of a movement around climate. We had bright economists and engineers and scientists, obviously, people coming up with policy solutions. The only part that we had forgotten was the movement itself, the people who had to put the necessary pressure on.

So we decided to see if maybe we could do this same thing outside of Vermont. It is a goofy place obviously, could we do it elsewhere, too? So on the 10th of January of this year, we (and in this case we means me and six kids who are just in the process of graduating from Middlebury, who are earning $100 a week to do this work), we set up a website called StepItUp07.org. We asked people: 'Would you organize demonstrations in your community on April 14th -- which was 12 weeks away -- to make this same demand: 80% cuts in carbon emissions by 2050?'

We had no money and we had no organization. We didn't have a list of people to start with. So we just started emailing all people that we knew and telling them to email on. We had no idea. We had low expectations because of that. Our secret goal was that we would organize 100 of these demonstrations over the course of those three months and that would be 100 more than there had been before. But instead the thing just took off, not in great thanks to us, but I think in great thanks to the fact that there were people all across the country who were haunted by this thing and yet had no idea exactly what to do about it. No idea, it's such a big problem, no idea where to stick the screwdriver in the crack and start jimmying. And all we did was say: 'Well, look here's the crack that you can start jimmying.' People responded unbelievably. All kinds of people.

I knew that this thing would be reasonably successful seven or eight days into it. I got a picture in the mail and the email from the University of Texas in Austin from a sorority house, the Alpha Phi sorority chapter at the University of Texas in Austin. There are 180 University of Texas sorority girls looking exactly as you would expect. There isn't a person in this room who could smile as widely as any of those girls. They had a big sign that said "Step It Up Congress Cut Carbon 80% by 2050". And they appended across the bottom a little note: they said "we wanted to show you it wasn't just hippies who cared about this". I say God bless you because that is exactly right. It is hippies, people like you and me, who think about the world a little off kilter, who start things. That's who starts things. But it's sorority chapters and chambers of commerce and Evangelical congregations, that finish them off, that move them so far into the mainstream that they can't be ignored or marginalized. And that's what began to happen over those ten or eleven weeks. It was unbelievable to be getting emails everyday from churches, from just every kind of people.

By the time we finished on April 14th there were 1400 of these demonstrations taking place simultaneously. It was so much fun to watch! We gathered in Washington that night. We rented out a room in the Smithsonian and invited all the people we could find around Washington because we wanted to show them this sort of thing, the results of this thing. So people were emailing, uploading pictures all day long of their demonstrations on our website and all these dignitaries are streaming in and the seven of us could hardly tear ourselves away from the computer screen because the pictures coming in were so beautiful, so moving.

We'd asked people to think about the geography of their place, to think about iconic places where they were that would make this sacred, and so they did. From Key West, where the only coral reefs in the continental US are, they didn't do a normal demonstration. They got tons of people in scuba gear and went down off those coral reefs and had an underwater demonstration with a big sign "Step It Up" to make the point that those coral reefs aren't going to be there in thirty years if that water temperature keeps warming. Already we're seeing leaching of huge swaths of coral each year. The video on the website of them demonstrating is so gorgeous. There's people on every side of this big gorgeous fish just swimming in and around in the middle of this thing, kind of joining in.

A little further up the coast in Jacksonville, Florida, which I've never been to but I suspect is somewhat different from Vermont, the sacred place they chose -- because it's where all the community gathers in the fall for big tailgate parties and things -- was the parking lot of the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL stadium. And what did they do? They rented a crane and they winched a guy twenty foot up into the air and they said: that's where the ocean is going to be if we don't step it up

In New York City there were thousands of people in blue shirts who got down in the Battery, Lower Manhattan, and linked arms made a kind of sea of people to show where the new tidal line would be. Out West people skied in formation down the dwindling glaciers in the Rockies that aren't going to be there much longer. Glacier National Park's not going to have any glaciers by 2030, really soon; they are melting really fast. It was amazing how people could figure out how to harness the genius of their place. And it was amazing to see that in many respects this set of demonstrations actually began to do a little bit of work, to actually have some effect. When we started, 80% cuts by 2050 was seen as a very radical idea. There were people who were advising us to pick something more realistic so we can claim victory in the end or whatever/ Well, that would be good, but actually everything is going to melt unless we get those cuts, so we're going to do this.

About eight weeks into this thing, before it even happened, we were starting to get calls from the different presidential campaigns, talking to John Edwards' people back and forth. Pretty soon we got a call from them saying: 'Look at our energy policy when it comes out tomorrow I think you'll like it.' And indeed when it came out, the first one to do a real energy policy, its centerpiece was cutting carbon 80% by 2050. Within two weeks of the end of this thing, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had signed on to Bernie Sanders' legislation in the Senate calling for the same thing, as co-sponsors. It has become part of the debate, something that the lobbyists for Exxon-Mobil have to rally against and move the bar up a little bit. It's begun to work. But of course, it's only the beginning. If you're going to have a movement, it needs to keep on moving. It needs to build momentum, especially if it's trying to do something as hard as undercut the main foundation of the economy that we've built. There's nothing that will be as staunchly independent as the incredible profits that there are to be made if you happen to own oil wells or coal mines or centralized utility systems or whatever it is. So we've got to build a much stronger movement, a much more powerful one.

We just yesterday issued the call for the second of these days of national climate action. It will be on November 3rd. I know that's just at the end of harvest season and everybody's tired and wanting to just go into hibernation for awhile, but we badly need you, in all your communities, to gather your communities and do another set of these demonstrations. And this time we are not concentrating so much on place, this time we are asking people to rally in spots that commemorate great leaders of the past, to use American history as a guide and to demand that politicians come forward and see if they match up to that template. We're calling it Step It Up to Who's a Leader.

Some of the heroes we know. None of them were saints, we're not asking for saints to come forward, if we need to rely on saints we probably won't get it done in time. We need leaders, people who, whatever their flaws, grasp the medal in the moment it was given to them and made the shifts they needed to make. Some of those leaders and heroes are national. I returned yesterday from one group of people in New Hampshire. There's going to be a rally on top of Mt. Washington and another group of climbers out in Washington State are going to be rallying on top of Mt. Jefferson. That will be good.

But many of them are local. We were talking yesterday with people in New York City who are going to try to do something big across the Brooklyn Bridge to honor that guy Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge; a piece of engineering that people said couldn't be done. But he believed that he could and he proved that he could, which is precisely the sort of engineering we need at the moment. We've even heard from people in Great Barrington about going to honor Robin Van En and the beginning of the CSA movement: the leadership that we really need.

Look, as I say, I don't really know how to do this work in particular. I'm a writer. I'm sort of shy in my nature, happiest sitting in my room and typing away. But with these amazing kids, and by the way, one of the best lessons of the last year: we always seem to worry about the environmental movement that it might be graying or something like that. Look, the kids are all right. Things are really starting to happen. It's so much fun to be working constantly with them, and they're different from my generation of college activists: the ratio of action to talk is considerably better and people are extraordinarily mature. They don't demand to change every facet of our culture and all the ways. They're very concentrated on the kind of changes that have to be made quickly and powerfully across our economy, across our society in order to get done what needs to be done.

So we need you there. It's time to gather communities. One of the things, maybe the only interesting thing really not knowing about this organizing, is what it did to me. When I started, people said, well the way you do this is you have a march on Washington. We didn't want to do that, A: because we didn't have any Martin Luther King to come talk to us and B: because there seemed something kind of bizarre about having people cross the continent spewing carbon to worry about global warming. But mostly because we really believed in this movement that you all helped to launch. This idea of globalness and of community and of the community as the place where one takes the stand and does what needs to be done. What we wanted to do was try to figure out how to make that community politically powerful on a larger level, too.

They don't call it Global Warming for nothing. We need to figure out how to do this in Washington and around the world to get the change we need in time. One of the tools we now have to make that happen is the internet, that possibility of connections. It's incredibly good to have the young people who know intuitively how to use those technologies in powerful ways. So that's why we did it, spread out like that. That's why we need to do it spread out like that again. Why we need you.

Act Neighborly because is makes ecological sense and Act Neighborly because it makes human sense. The highest cost of cheap fossil fuel wasn't global warming, the highest cost at least for us may have been that it allowed us to be the first generation of humans that there ever were that didn't need our neighbors for anything. If you have a credit card and telephone you don't have a need for anybody. It turns out that is a horrible way to be a human being.

I have no absolute guarantees to offer you that it's all going to come out okay. I mean, I wrote a book called End of Nature. But for the moment anyway, I am incredibly charged up and optimistic and frightened as hell. It is possible, in fact that we are going to do it, but it is going to be extraordinarily close. Science has given us a very short window to do what needs to be done. It's going to take immense effort to catapult our society, our planet through that window before it shuts. We're going to do it, it's going to be close, we need every one of you doing all the things you're already doing all day long but also doing this kind of political work. It's really important to screw in the new light bulb above your kitchen table. It's even more important to screw in the new congressman to make sure that we get the work done that needs to be done. So thank you all enormously for the work you have done. You have turned the corner in this society. You have started the work of rescuing America from the trap that it had fallen into. So thank you for that and thank you in advance for all the work you are going to do in the years to come. God bless you.

This page was last modified on October 03, 2008 at 5:51:24 AM.