This year’s devastating series of weather disasters, energized by warmest-ever ocean temperatures, may go down as a milepost on the path to a Frankenstein climate on the only planet most of us will ever call home. As we struggle to aid those most directly affected, environmental activist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben will be in Buffalo Friday to talk about how we can get ourselves out of this mess – if we can at all. His talk, “The Desperate Climate Fight: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Moment,” is a highlight of the Buffalo Humanities Festival.
The last time McKibben was in Buffalo, it was on a day that humanity sighted another milepost on that path. Four years ago, while giving the commencement address for the UB School of Architecture and Planning, McKibben told the audience that earlier that day, for the first time in recorded history, there was a reading of atmospheric carbon above 400 parts per million.
That number is immediately significant to anyone familiar with the organization for climate action founded by McKibben and others around the world: www.350.org. That single number represents the carbon level that most scientists agree we can’t exceed without suffering consequences that we may not be able to manage. Just ask anyone with ties to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands how well we’re managing the consequences of a warming planet.
McKibben’s 2013 visit was in no small part due to a personal connection here: UB Fulbright Scholar and Doctoral Fellow in Food Systems Planning Subhashni Raj of Fiji. Before coming to UB, Raj had worked with McKibben as an organizer. He had written her a letter of recommendation, and in 2013, she introduced him.
Her introduction is as good an insight into McKibben as you’re likely to get from anything you might find by Googling him. And no matter who introduces him on Friday, it’s doubtful they could capture him so well. So here is her introduction from 2013:
There is a duality to Bill McKibben, that often gets lost in his very public persona. He is the author of a dozen books on the environment, and many more essays and pieces for the popular press. His first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989, was heralded as the first book for the general audience on climate change. Bill was ahead of his time then, and has always been a visionary. Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, board member of Grist Magazine, and an awardee of many prestigious fellowships, including the Guggenheim and Lyndhurst. The list can go on, if you Google him. It really does.
Bill is also a name synonymous with the growing grassroots climate movement. And the truth is, those who work with him, will describe him as the reluctant leader. Bill never asked to be an activist; circumstances thrust that role upon him. Getting arrested on Capitol Hill was not part of the career path he had in mind. The journey to founding 350.org, the grassroots climate organization, started with his students at Middlebury. They told me they wanted to move to Montana and shut down coal plants. But really, they just wanted to continue to work together, and didn’t know how to do that after graduation. Bill, as their mentor, helped and supported them transition into professional life through what was to become 350.org. So instead of moving to Montana, they built a global climate movement instead with Bill. Their first global day of action was held in 2009 by 350.org, and championed by local organizers on the ground, where over 5,000 actions took place in 181 countries.
This wasn’t by some UN designation that brought people together. This was purely people mobilizing around an idea, a vision, and hope for real change. It gave a voice to the vulnerable, and to those who are usually out of sight and out of our minds. It helped me find mine. Bill understands the need for social and environmental justice. He understands that we need to bring stakeholders together, much like urban planners do. But we need everyone in on this fight. I have watched him debate and enamor people with facts. I have seen his work to empower so many. And that’s because he manages to communicate this message where almost poetic voice and simplicity that we can all understand.
And as you listen to Bill speak today, you will realize that this ability is also something very ordinary or very human. But he is still a rock star. I have known Bill McKibben for the past four years now, and he is one of the reasons why I stand before you today. I went back and looked at emails I have exchanged with him over the years, trying to find some wisdom he gave to me once I can share today. Instead, I found a note he sent to me as I lay in a hospital bed recovering from surgery. He told me: get well quick, because we need you in fighting shape.
And that is the other side to Bill McKibben—the writer and scholar extraordinaire, and the reluctant leader who inspires an entire movement of people across the planet because of his humanness, humility, and honesty. In five minutes I cannot begin to do justice to Bill’s lifetime of work and achievement. So I will stop, so Bill can do what he does best: inspire our generation with words of advice that hopefully will provide guidance to where life takes us all next.
After this introduction at the 2013 commencement, Dean Robert Shibley awarded Bill McKibben the Dean’s Medal. In giving it he joked that, according to school legend, when the same medal was awarded to R. Buckminster Fuller, Fuller went on to speak for three hours – but McKibben would have twenty minutes. You can watch McKibben’s speech in this video of the proceedings, or read the transcript below.
Note that part of McKibben’s speech was accompanied by slides. I was able to find many of the images online and interspersed them throughout the transcript.
Look, I’m not going to speak for three hours. I might not even speak for 20 minutes. But a commencement address is kind of, well, it’s a kind of landmark in your education. For a very long time now, back almost to kindergarten, you’ve been expected to sit still and listen to old people tell you things. Just a few minutes from now, that will all be over. I’m the last obstacle between you and your diploma. And there is the kind of sadistic side that makes me want to drag it out just to see how long…
The other problem with having me here to speak to you is commencement should be an entirely celebratory event. You all have done amazing things, and have come a very long way, and you’re at a moment of epic promise, so it may not be absolutely wise to invite to speak to you someone whose most well-known book has the cheerful title, The End of Nature. I’ll try to end on an upbeat note, but let me begin by saying that the day on which you graduate will actually be a day, for more than your graduation, that this planet long remembers.
If you go to the big island of Hawaii, and if you drive inland from the resorts at Kona onto the dirt road that bisects that island, at a certain point you’ll come to an intersection. And there’s another very primitive dirt road leading up onto the slopes of Mauna Loa, the great volcano—the largest volcano on the island. And as you climb halfway up that slope, you come to a Quonset hut that marks a scientific field station, and therein sits what is almost certainly the most important scientific instrument in the planet’s history. It’s been there since 1959, when scientists first grew concerned that our constant combustion of coal and gas and oil was putting enough carbon into the atmosphere to perhaps begin a heating of this earth. And when they put that rather simple instrument up—the last time I was there, it was still running on vacuum tubes—the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 315 parts per million, already slightly elevated from before the industrial revolution. But that curve of rising carbon has been going up ever since, and about three hours ago it ticked past, for the first time, 400 parts per million.
We’re in territory now that hasn’t been seen for about five million years on this planet. It’s a grim landmark, on a road that’s already seen enormous damage from the heating that we’ve already caused so far. Collectively, human beings have already raised the temperature of the earth by about one degree, and that’s been enough to accomplish remarkable things. 80% of the summer sea ice in the arctic is gone, now. If you look down on our planet from outer space, it looks profoundly different than when Neal Armstrong stood on the moon. If you go to the ocean and stick a pH strip into the water—anyplace on the planet—it comes out a different color than it would have 40 years ago. The ocean is 30% more acidic as a result of the changes in the chemistry of sea water as it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. Here on land, because warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister, on average, an enormous change—one that loads the dice for drought and for torrential downpour.
Those are the facts so far of this world. For everybody in this room, the most important thing that happened in your lifetime was the exit of our planet from what scientists called the Holocene, the ten-thousand-year period of climatic stability that underwrote the rise of human civilization. Now we’re in some new epoch. It has as yet no name, and the question is, how far into it we will go? The same scientists who told us that we would raise the temperature one degree now tell us that, unless we get off coal and gas and oil far more quickly than any government currently intends, that temperature will rise 4 or 5 degrees before…well, before your careers are over.
And if that happens, there is no reason to think that we can carry out civilizations of the kinds that we imagine. Those of us of the Empire State, looking across this state at its biggest city, got some small sense of that last October, when the storm with the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, the storm with the largest wind field ever measured from a satellite, when that storm drove the Atlantic Ocean into the New York City subway system, if you had any doubts about the vulnerability of our technological civilization to the souped-up nature we are creating, that should have ended them.
And so, as you graduate, you enter a world that will need—need in ways perhaps it didn’t before—all the professional skill that you can bring to it. Your training is now not just an end to a profitable and rewarding career, but something that our society badly, badly needs. Think about the role that planners now must take on as they figure out how to adapt a physical society that was built for the Holocene into one that can cope with the change that we already seen, the degree rise in temperature that leads, for instance, to rainfall at levels that we’ve never seen before, that calls for an entire recalculation of how we design cities, towns, and buildings. That calls for playing inspired defense against what are increasingly difficult elements to deal with, but we also need you playing inspired offense. Think of the changes that we need make if we are going to be able to keep that temperature from rising any more than we have to.
It was beautiful to come in today and see the solar panels. This new array, beautifully arrayed out on the entrance—a work of art as well as engineering. And a good reminder of the direction we have so far basically failed to go in as a society and which we need to go at great speed and which we can go if you apply your skills. We know we can go there because we have a few examples around the world. Germany—the one country that has taken this crisis with the seriousness that it deserves—has set its mind on transformation. Germany, where there were days last summer when it generated more than have the power it consumed from solar panels within its borders. That’s a remarkable thing. It’s a demonstration of what is possible, because, of course, Germany is not exactly the sunniest place on the whole planet. Munich is north of Montreal. Think what a country could do if it had, say, oh, I don’t know, Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California to call on. Think what you’ll be able to do if you get to work—at the moment there are more solar panels in Bavaria than there are in the United States, which gives you plenty of room to push, push, this system all the time. And I have no doubt, given your training here, that you are more than up to the task.
But it will call, if we are going to make this transition, not just, or perhaps even primarily, on your professional skill. We also need to call on your skills as citizens. One of the things that comes with graduation—in our society as close as we have to a kind of rite of passage into the next stage of your life—a kind of acknowledgement that you are fully adult now, leaving behind some of the bubble that education provides, and moving, we hope, forcefully and powerfully into the larger world. So we celebrate your professional acumen, but we desperately need your civic engagement.
And I can testify how important that engagement is. When we started 350.org five years ago, there was no movement about climate change in this country, or in this world. There was just the belief, among most people, that our leaders would do something, because the scientists had told them that we were facing the greatest crisis we had ever faced. But I had watched for 20 years as nothing happened, as we had a perfect two-decade bipartisan record in Washington of accomplishing nothing. So we decided that we need a movement—that we needed people rising up, that we would never be able to outspend the fossil fuel industry, which has a deep and vested stake in making sure nothing ever changes. Since we couldn’t outspend them, we would need to find other currencies we could work in.
When we started, as Subhashni said, we asked people all over the world to join us, and they did. Here are what citizens look like in thousands and thousands and thousands of places around the world. People exercising their wit, and their love for the planet. Religious leaders in that picture uh, people coming together across difficult lines—that’s Jordan, and Palestine, and Israel. People all over the planet. Those are our brothers and sisters in the Maldives, a country, like Fiji, threatened by the quick rise of the ocean. That’s their student government association meeting in the lagoon. Everybody in that “0” [in “350”] are all in full black Burqa. To us, they do not look like members of the Sierra Club, but in fact their hearts are in the same place, thinking about the future.
It goes on and on, and I could show you literally thousands of these pictures, because we have had 20 thousand demonstrations, in every country except North Korea, and to me they are absolutely beautiful to look at. And they are the definition of what citizens are and who they are and what they mean. It doesn’t happen unless you make it happen—nothing important happens automatically or easily, especially when there are vested interests at stake.
Some of the time, the action that you have to take is dramatic. And I’ll show you a few pictures of that. It wasn’t a great deal of fun to get to spend three days in central cell block in DC protesting this proposed Keystone Pipeline, but it wasn’t the end of the world, either, you know. The end of the world is the end of the world, and that’s why we do what we do. Most of the time, things that we need you to do are more prosaic: public hearings, and committee meetings, and letter writing—and all equally crucial. All involving setting aside your own particular interests, and acting, instead, in the common good. And at a time when we have never needed it more than we need it right now.
At the moment, vested interest is winning this fight. The temperature is going up, and more carbon is pouring into the atmosphere every day. But it is possible, it is possible, for us to rally, and it is necessary for us to rally, because we are in the place where we can make a difference. There’s one picture here I want to show you—well, two pictures. This is one for planners to think about. Those people live in the part of Pakistan that in 2010 saw the greatest rainfall they’d ever recorded. The Indus River covered one quarter of that country, and 20 million people were forced from their homes. That’s the kind of future we face—everywhere—unless we act.
This may have been the smallest demonstration, almost, that we have ever sponsored. It’s just six or seven kids standing in a street in Haiti, that’s turned into a dirty little river. For me, it’s important because of what those signs say, that the two children are holding: Your Actions Affect Me. And they do. More people died in Haiti from Hurricane Sandy than died in New York. Your actions affect me, but it doesn’t work the other way around: there is nothing they can do to significantly change the outcome of this story. They don’t burn enough fossil fuel that if they stopped burning it, it would make a difference. They do not have important companies close to home to protest, nor centers of government power that they can turn to. They have only us, and the hope that we will rise to the moral and practical challenge that they present to us.
My guess is, that given the pace with which the climate is changing, my guess is that this crisis will be one of the central texts of your lives—in fact, a final exam far more important than the exams you have taken in the weeks just past. A test both of your skill, and of your character. And I know, that like my friend Subhashni, you are completely capable of rising to this test. In fact, I have no doubt whatsoever that you will pass that test, and that as you do, you will do this tired, overheated planet an enormous amount of good.
Note: most of the text in this article is from a verbatim transcript I made from video of the commencement.
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