ON THE MARCH
Soft-spoken author who helped inspire a global movement leads the charge on climate change,
Bill McKibben is the sort of warrior every cause wishes it had.
One of the founders of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate change movement, McKibben spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone pipeline, brought hundreds of thousands together for a climate march in New York in 2014 and, now, has launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
McKibben, 54, has become a major obstacle for the Canadian government and Alberta’s oilsands industry. He has changed environmental politics permanently, at least in North America.
It’s not a role he sought, nor one he relishes.
“It’s less remarkable than it sounds. . . . We have lost more battles than we have won,” says McKibben. He’s laughing — but at the irony of it all. “The planet is still heating up, and that sort of proves we are still losing.”
Like the planet, the fight to save it from catastrophe is heating up in different regions because, as McKibben and scientists warn, time is running out.
On Sunday, McKibben will lead a march — along with activists such as Jane Fonda, Naomi Klein, David Suzuki and musician Joel Plaskett — through Toronto’s downtown core. Hundreds are expected to join the protest, which is as much about jobs and justice as it is about the climate.
“It’s about people who understand that jobs in the future, a working economy in the future, depends on a working climate,” says McKibben, who lived in Toronto for about five years in the 1960s and attended Northlea Public School in Leaside. He says it has been sad to watch Canada become a rogue actor on environmental issues, “thanks to (Prime Minister Stephen) Harper and the Conservatives.” He adds, “It will be great fun for me to see the other side of Canada on the streets.”
A generation ago, a march like this wouldn’t have happened.
Climate change was still an obscure issue for many in the 1980s. McKibben was just beginning to delve into it. In December 1988, he wrote about the subject for the first time — “Is the World Getting Hotter?” was the headline for his article in the New York Review of Books.
But his real journey from writer to activist started the next year, when he wrote The End of Nature, widely acknowledged as the first popular book that dealt with climate change. In it, he made a plea for Earth’s restoration, warning that humans had become the “most powerful source for change on the planet.”
In the years that followed, McKibben was prolific, authoring more than a dozen ruminative books about the environment, the economy and other issues. The soft-spoken man has toured the world talking about climate change, the issue he calls the “greatest struggle, the greatest story.”
Humans, he says, “have never done anything like this before.”
In the past two decades, McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, has won many admirers (especially among young people) and made many enemies (especially in the fossil fuel industry). Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s chief executive officer, once called him a “purveyor of fear.”
McKibben — who lives with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, in a solarpanelled house — has taken climate change into the living rooms of ordinary American people and lawmakers, shifting the environmental movement from a policy focus to grassroots organizing and mobilization.
“I don’t fool myself that I have played an enormous role in all of that,” he says.
“It is people everywhere taking ideas and making them matter. I love watching it.”
“It’s less remarkable than it sounds. . . . We have lost more battles than we have won. The planet is still heating up, and that sort of proves we are still losing.”
BILL MCKIBBEN
ON CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT