After predicting the effects of global warming in The End of Nature, author Bill McKibben sees sustainability in community-based efforts in his new book, Deep Economy. Photo by Nancie Battaglia.

Recognizing the need to generate more action around the issue of global warming, McKibben has orchestrated a day of protest — Step It Up 2007 — on Sat., April 14, to urge elected officials to take immediate steps to meet the planetary crisis.

“Rather than bring a million people to Washington, D.C., and burn up even more hydrocarbons in the process,” says McKibben, “we want everyone to gather within their locality. It is going to be the biggest day of environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970.”

McKibben has deep roots in the Northwest. His grandfather was once the mayor of Kirkland. Another interesting item in his personal history is that McKibben once ran a homeless shelter in New York City.

Real Change: I consider your contribution to the discussion of technology and society to be in the venerable tradition of Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, Kirkpatrick Sale, and others who have given us erudite critiques of materialism, of industrial and technological excess.

Bill McKibber: That’s very kind of you. Most of the inspiration of my work stems from my first book, The End of Nature. The world we have known was about to undergo a significant change. Global warming demonstrates that human beings have grown to a point where we are able to alter everything around us in dangerous ways. It calls into question everything about our previously held conceptions about how the world’s ecology works. At this point I am very interested in the existential questions that are raised. In American culture, this is a question of individualism versus community. In another of my books, The Age of Missing Information, I noted that our TV culture tells us that the individual human being watching the TV is the most important thing on earth. That is an ecologically, psychologically, and socially dangerous message. The point of my new book, Deep Economy, is that the system of hyper-individualism underlies our rapid economic growth, and it’s no better for us than it is for the planet. It leaves us less happy and less socially connected. This is bad news, but it’s also good news. It means that we can maybe break our addictions to materialism. All of my work is a little subversive, to make people wonder if their understanding of the world is as solid as the conventional wisdom would have it.

RC: Must we come to a similar sense of understanding required of any addict to drugs or alcohol, that once the pleasure is gone, a plan for recovery is necessary?

BM: We don’t want to take this analogy too far. We don’t want to dishonor people who struggle with horrible physical addictions, but I think it’s apropos in another sense. An addict must struggle to imagine an alternative to the troubled reality to which he or she is accustomed. One’s vision closes in, if you’re a junkie. Likewise our society’s vision is closed in. We can no longer imagine any arrangement that does not involve economic growth. We can’t envision how we might exist without having more stuff than we had last year. Growth for the sake of growth has become the measuring post, and what you measure is what you do. It’s hard to break out of that. We may not. Many addicts don’t break out of addiction. I’ve known more failures than successes. But some do recover. So one keeps going.

RC: Stakes here are high. In Aldous Huxley’s fictional Brave New World, he writes of how the advocates of simple living were violently eliminated to pave the way for an elaborate technocratic order. What are we up against, and how do we bring about positive change?

BM: We will either change, or change will be imposed on us by nature. The physical systems now set in motion are enormous. If we can indeed head them off, the window of opportunity is small. Our habitual patterns of activity are not sustainable. I hope that we will change voluntarily. I am encouraged by that prospect. We have organized a global warming protest which we’re calling Step It Up 2007. We started the web site in mid-January. We wanted to organize rallies around the country this coming April 14th to demand big changes. We had no money; it was me and six college students. There are now over a thousand rallies planned nationwide! This level of concern wasn’t there even a year ago. I’m very hopeful that we will have an entirely peaceful day.

RC: Please talk about your new book, Deep Economy.

BM: We are past the point where small fixes are going to have any impact on our problems. One curious thing about our present economy is that it grows ever larger without doing anything to address the social inequities in our society. In fact it exacerbates social inequities. You would think that it would be impossible, but it seems to be dictated by the internal logic of that economic system, that only a few benefit by the system. The ultimate hope of my current book is that in building localized economies, we might be able to address both social injustice and the environmental peril that we presently face.

I think scale is extraordinarily important. It has gotten out of control. It’s been a long time since Congress has seen fit to raise the minimum wage. But many states and cities have passed better minimum wage laws than the federal law. It is not so easy to abstract the poor when they are close by. Marshall McLuhan aside, I don’t think that we can have a working community on a global scale. We must build local economies. I don’t worry about the ultimate size of what might be viable. Local economies require that people come into more intimate contact with each other.

Local economies also translate into a more sensible pattern of energy use; you use a hell of a lot less energy. It’s crazy that the average bite of food in this country travels 2,000 miles to reach our lips. Only in the perverse economics of cheap fossil fuel could we bring a head of lettuce from California to New York so people can eat the same menu all year round, and yet ignore what is going on seasonally around a local community. One result, of course, is that the lettuce doesn’t even taste very good.

RC: You are a Methodist. What about the spiritual dimension of this question?

BM: I’ve addressed this question more in other books, but to a very large extent our religious communities have also become infected by hyper-individualism. Not long ago, a poll was taken of American Christians, and 75 percent of those interviewed said that the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” is a Biblical phrase. Of course, it’s not. It’s from Ben Franklin. It’s really weird, but it is precisely the opposite of the sentiment in the Bible. Jesus says over and over again: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s basically the opposite of helping yourself only. And it turns out Jesus was right. It works out better if we take care of our neighbors. In the end, we are social creatures.

RC: Is there thus a practical dimension — whether perceived from a religious or nonreligious point of view — to fostering a sense of community and neighborliness?

BM: Absolutely. That’s what we are built for. The central teachings of every religious tradition and every wise person who arises in human history remind us of that fact. But we’ve bought into an economic system in which more is better. Yet we now know that there is no longer a correlation between wealth and happiness. A yearly $10,000 income in most countries means base sufficiency. However, in most civilized countries around the world, that means you also get health care, education, and retirement benefits. Even in developing societies there is a greater social sense of things.

RC: A recent U.N. study assessed the well-being of children, and out of all the countries studied, the U.S. and Great Britain ranked at the bottom.

BM: Thank you, Adam Smith.

RC: Please comment on the war in Iraq.

BM: What a great sadness. There are so many bad reasons for doing what we are doing. Our system of growth is threatened by the potential loss of oil. My state of Vermont has lost more people per capita in Iraq than any other state in the union. It pisses me off every day. The war in Iraq is the logical conclusion of an economic model that considers its success only in terms of growth. How do you ensure growth? You provide cheap energy. The central part of this is the use of fossil fuel. The moment we run out of fossil fuel will be an interesting moment. Or better yet, we decide to no longer use fossil fuel because of its damaging effect on the environment. Global warming is such a huge problem it may force us to rethink this whole situation.

Or maybe we won’t deal with it. We will then discover just how deep our addiction is, whether or not we deal with it. There is no question that detox will be painful. If we get through it, the world will be better than the one we inhabit now. But that is not to minimize the challenge and unpleasantness of going through the process of transformation.

RC: You have had the pleasant surprise of witnessing an enthusiastic reaction to your rallying call to protest global warming. More people before April 14 will likely hop on board. Can we hope for a kind of Manhattan Project for the development of solar energy?

BM: The Manhattan Project is not the best analogy. Maybe an Apollo Project, so all of us can stand on earth. But after 20 years of hitting myself against the wall, it is gratifying to know that now people really are listening. n

[Rally]

The national call to curb the worst effects of global warming is scheduled for April 14. In Seattle, a march, rally, and informational fair starts at 2 p.m. in Pioneer Square’s Occidental Park. See www.stepitupseattle.org for more info.