Dream A Little Dream

Bill McKibben On Reforming Our Supersized Society

Contrary to what the title of his first book, The End of Nature (Random House), might imply, Bill McKibben spends a good deal of time thinking and writing about the future of the natural world. Though he has devoted many pages to the frightening potential consequences of global warming and other environmental threats, he also consistently offers a more hopeful vision. Nature and humanity can coexist harmoniously, he believes, if we make wise, sustainable choices that cultivate the land rather than scar it.

Published in 1989, The End of Nature sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming. It was a bestseller in the United States and has been translated into twenty languages. Since then McKibben has written nine books on topics ranging from overpopulation, in Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (Penguin), to genetic engineering, in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Henry Holt).

McKibben’s father was a business journalist who served as ombudsman for the Boston Globe. The family lived in Lexington, Massachusetts, and through junior high and high school, McKibben worked as a reporter for the Lexington Minuteman. In summers he put on a tricorn hat and guided tourists around the Battle Green, site of the 1775 skirmish that marked the start of the American Revolution. The experience left a lasting impression on him, McKibben says. After having told the story, over and over again, of the eight men who died there defending the most basic ideals of democracy, he never confused dissent with a lack of patriotism.

McKibben went on to study at Harvard University, where he served as editor of the campus newspaper. After graduation, he became a whiz-kid staff writer for the New Yorker. At twenty-six he quit that job to move with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, to a rustic cabin in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where he wrote The End of Nature a year later. McKibben also taught Sunday school and worked on regional conservation issues, and he and his wife had their first — and, by choice, only — child.

The family has since moved to Vermont’s Champlain Valley, where McKibben is a scholar-in-residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College, but they still own the cabin. McKibben’s latest book, Wandering Home (Crown Journeys), chronicles a long walk he took from agrarian, community-oriented Vermont to that cabin in the sparsely populated Adirondacks: a journey from the pastoral to the wild. In the book McKibben visits with Vermont farmers growing crops for local biodiesel use; vintners making wine from grapes specially bred to thrive in the North; and foresters working to promote locally grown and milled wood. In the Adirondacks he crosses rivers and steep ravines and bushwhacks his way through thick stands of timber. At one point he encounters an abandoned farmstead, now dense with forest, a lone apple tree and a cellar the only signs of prior human habitation, and he asks himself, What does it mean for a place to be truly wild?

I first came across McKibben’s work when I was an English major and budding environmentalist at the University of Montana in Missoula. I got the chance to meet him a few years later when he spoke at the University of Minnesota. We exchanged stories about Earth First!, a controversial activist organization that I had been involved with in Montana, and that he had observed and researched over the years. When I asked him to sign my book, he wrote, “Earth First! Last! And always!” I conducted this interview many years later, by telephone: he in his Vermont home in a meadow near the poet Robert Frost’s one-time cabin; I on the small Montana farm where I live with my husband and children. Many of the themes we discussed are ones McKibben takes on at length in his upcoming book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, due out in early winter from Times Books. When I called, McKibben and his daughter were assembling a pizza using tomatoes and basil from their garden, cheese from a local dairy, flour from a nearby farm, and a few imported Kalamata olives.

Adams: What inspired you to write The End of Nature?

McKibben: I had just quit my job at the New Yorker and moved to the Adirondacks. Land in upstate New York was still cheap then; even an unemployed writer could buy a house. I soon found out that my new home was in the middle of the largest intact wilderness in the eastern United States — a place remarkable not only for its size, but also for the ecological recovery that it had undergone: the entire area had been clear-cut a century before. In many ways it was an ideal place to start thinking and writing about the emerging phenomenon of global warming. My locale helped me understand not only the practical implications, but also the powerful metaphysical, philosophical, and emotional implications of the impending disaster. Most poignant for me was the idea that this wilderness that I was falling in love with wasn’t going to stay the same for much longer. The rise in global temperature has put at risk our cold, hard winter: this incredible season when everything becomes vast and graceful and magnificent.

There are more-important reasons to worry about global warming — such as the hundreds of millions of environmental refugees it will create, or the huge percentage of species it will make extinct — but for me, personally, there’s also this sense of how sad it will be when these woods are no longer covered in snow for several months out of the year. So the dominant emotion in The End of Nature is less fear than it is sadness and grief.

Adams: Winter here in Montana has certainly changed a lot since my childhood.

McKibben: At our latitude, winter is on average about two to three weeks shorter now than it was in 1970.

Adams: You have said that any attempt to deal with climate change will require more than environmentalism as we’ve known it. What do you mean?

McKibben: We’ve been building this movement for the last 150 years, and it has accomplished marvelous things: the conservation of wilderness; the reduction of pollution in the air and the water. But the movement isn’t nearly big enough and strong enough to handle global warming, because climate change arises from the use of fossil fuels, which are at the heart of pretty much every part of modern life. A problem of this size can be tackled only with enormous changes in technology, in the economy, in our behavior, and in our very idea of who we are. That challenge is too big for the Sierra Club to handle. Any effort to solve the problem will have to involve every aspect of human society: churches, businesses, education. Whatever movement emerges to deal with global warming — and hopefully one will soon — is going to owe a debt to environmentalism, but it won’t be just an outgrowth of the environmental movement.

Adams: It sounds as if you’re suggesting it will take a global shift in consciousness.

McKibben: Yes, many shifts in consciousness. And the most important one will be in this country: whether we’re going to continue to be a hyperindividualist society, or return to a stronger sense of community. Unless we figure out how to do the latter, the task of reducing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, among other things, will be mathematically impossible.

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