"My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve—dangerously naïve."
— Environmentalist Bill McKibben on taking a drastically stripped-down approach to the flow of money in U.S. Congressional politics. Keep reading …
For connoisseurs, Barack Obama’s fundraising emails for the 2012 election campaign seem just a tad forlorn—slightly limp reminders of the last time ‘round.
Four years ago at this time, the early adopters among us were just starting to get used to the regular flow of email from the Obama campaign. The missives were actually exciting to get, because they seemed less like appeals for money than a chance to join a movement.
Sometimes they came with inspirational videos from Camp Obama, especially the volunteer training sessions staged by organizing guru Marshall Ganz. Here’s a favorite of mine, where a woman invokes Bobby Kennedy and Cesar Chavez and says that, as the weekend went on, she “felt her heart softening,” her cynicism “melting,” her determination building. I remember that feeling, and I remember clicking time and again to send another $50 off to fund that people-powered mission.
None of us gave $50 hoping for a favor. Quite the opposite. You gave $50 hoping that, for the first time in a long while in American politics, no one would get a favor. And the candidate, it must be said, led us on.
"I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days. As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet."
— Outspoken environmentalist Bill McKibben on going to prison for the planet. Keep reading …
Bill McKibben, virtuosic climate change advocate and Utne Reader visionary, sits down for a little chat with The Nation.
Utne Reader Visionary Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben basically invented the job title “climate change expert”: After all, he wrote the first general-audience book on the subject back in 1989, opening the world’s eyes to a then-obscure threat. Since then, he has continued to draw awareness to the predicament in a prodigious stream of books, articles, and media appearances, always coming off as reasoned and authoritative even when climate-change deniers attempt to paint those who bring this message as unhinged and alarmist.
Read the full profile of Bill McKibben and an interview with him. Plus, check out the other Utne Reader visionaries from 2010.
Utne Reader: Environmentalists are often told that we’re not supposed to mention things like, oh, civilization as we know it may cease to exist if we don’t do something. But it seems to me that we’ve got to start talking candidly about this. How do we do that without setting off this fear response that allegedly is unhealthy for people?
Bill McKibben: “I don’t know—and so my default mechanism is just to tell the truth. You know what my books are about. The last book, Eaarth (Times Books, 2010), was no punches pulled. It’s a pretty grim first chapter, it must be said. But it’s just a recitation of the evidence about where we are, with no attempt to sort of showboat it or anything—just say it: Here’s what’s going on, right now. And it’spossible that—you can make an argument that we need to figure out some other message or framing or something—I’m not clever enough to do it. So my default mechanism is just to tell people the truth. And 350 is kind of the height of that. That’s the most important number we know about the world right now.”
Read the rest of the interview here.
One step: “we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get.” Read the rest of the article.
