Conscious Choice: Checking in with Bill McKibben

July 1999 | Citizen at Large

Checking in with Bill McKibben

by Jay Walljasper

Even as a teenager growing up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts, Bill McKibben — author of bestsellers such as The End of Nature, a sharp warning about the consequences of environmental atrocities committed by our modern civilization, and The Age of Missing Information, a meditation on the numbing mindlessness of television — showed a subversive streak. He spent summers in a tricorner hat guiding tourists around the historic Lexington town green, where in 1775 villagers confronted Redcoats in the first skirmish of the War of Independence. "Maybe that accounts for my rebellious nature," he muses.

In his writing McKibben has chronicled the opening shots of another revolution no less sweeping in its challenge to the existing political and economic order.

At the outset, its prospects for victory look every bit as daunting as the chances of the ragtag Minute Men against the military might of the British Empire.

This time it’s a battle against the rising use of fossil fuels, the global spread of consumer culture, the titillating allure of advertising, and the unquestioned worship of economic growth. If these forces are not overcome, McKibben argues, we’ll see a steady upsurge in environmental and human devastation from global warming, famine, out-of-control technology, alienation, war, overpopulation, and the extinction of plant and animal species.

"We are in much worse shape than we were 20 years ago," he notes. "You can point to all kinds of environmental successes — cleaning up the Great Lakes, cleaning up the air over Los Angeles — but it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans because the system creating those problems keeps going. What we’ve learned is that it’s going to be a lot harder than we thought. The vested economic interests causing environmental impoverishment are very powerful.

"The market forces pushing convenience, individualism, and comfort are still stronger than the attraction of community, fellowship, and connection with the natural world," he adds. "This is the core of the environmental crisis and of an accompanying spiritual crisis. What we call the environmental crisis is really a crisis of desire. We’re losing the battle to offer people an alternative set of things to desire. It’s Disney and GM who are creating our desires."

Instead of armed resistance, McKibben believes, this revolution must be an insurgency of simplicity and elegance. "Our task is to demonstrate that to live simply is more elegant, more satisfying, and more pleasurable than consumer society. It doesn’t work to just tell people to get out of their cars to save the upper atmosphere. Instead we need to encourage them to ride a bike. It’s elegant. It’s fun. It makes you feel better. It’s important not to say that TV will rot your brain, but that it’s satisfying to take a walk in the moonlight instead.

"If consumer society has one Achilles heel," McKibben points out, "it’s not that it is going to destroy the earth — it is, but that’s not the Achilles heel. The Achilles heel is that consumer society doesn’t make us unbelievably happy."

Discussions about curtailing consumerism and limiting growth frequently get sidetracked by prickly questions about economic justice. It’s dandy for folks in Marin County or Boulder to embrace the simple life but try telling that to slum dwellers in Latin America or peasants in Asia. But McKibben believes that’s exactly where this revolution is beginning. In his new book, Hope, Human, and Wild he points to the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Indian state of Kerala as sort of the Lexington and Concord in the global struggle for environmental sustainability and the promise of a good life for all earth’s inhabitants.

Curitiba, a city of 1.5 million in southern Brazil with a per capita income of $2500, has much to teach Paris, Prague, and San Francisco about urban charm and vitality. It’s one of the greenest cities in the world, with hundreds of new parks and plazas added in recent years, and it boasts probably the best bus system anywhere. Deciding that subways were too expensive, the city created a network of busways — streets reserved exclusively for buses, which means far faster and more convenient service for riders. Although it has more cars per capita than other Brazilian cities it uses 25 percent less gasoline. Like Rio and Sao Paulo it has sprawling shantytowns, but special municipal programs aimed at children offer a measure of hope not found in most Third World slums. And its slums are surprisingly clean, since under an innovative program poor Curitibans receive a bag of groceries in return for each bag of garbage turned into the city.

But Curitiba offers more than efficient government services. McKibben rhapsodizes about the lively street life, cultural amenities, and urban innovations such as a municipal skateboard ramp and Saturday morning art lessons where kids draw on huge sheets of paper spread out on the city’s main pedestrian street. The downtown, "is as alive as any urban district in the world...A rich and diverse and actual place that makes the American imitations — the South Street Seaports and Faneiuil Hall Marketplaces — seem like the wan and controlled re-creations that they are." After spending a month there with his wife and infant daughter, in a city that would be classified as impoverished by the standards of any Western nation, McKibben writes, "We decided, with great delight, that Curitiba is among the world’s great cities."

McKibben also points to Kerala, a densely-populated state on the west coast of India with a long tradition of peasant activism, as a place that has much to teach far wealthier societies about economics and human dignity. The leftist parties that have long governed the state emphasize a fair distribution of resources over economic growth, with impressive results. "It has a per capita income of $300 a year," McKibben notes, "but its quality of life measures — infant mortality, life expectancy, female literacy rate, birth rate — are comparable to the United States."

"In other words," McKibben writes, "Kerala mirrors the United States on about one-seventieth the cash....It is a subversive fact, this little chunk of India, one that could potentially help undermine the developed world’s instinctive resistance to change."

The third spot in the book where Mc-Kibben finds hope for the future is another place often dismissed as poor and backward — the upper reaches of Appalachia in upstate New York. "It’s the world’s biggest experiment in eco-restoration," he says. "One hundred years ago it was all clear-cut, now it’s a beautiful forest. Nature has a real ability to replenish itself." It’s the place McKibben now calls home. He and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, left the razzmatazz of New York City behind several years ago for the simple pleasures and wild beauty of the Adirondacks. He’s now treasurer of the Garnet Lake Fire Department and a Sunday school teacher at the Johnsburg United Methodist Church. These are the roles he plans to play in the coming revolution in addition to writing and parenting. "Living here conspires to keep me hopeful, which is important if you’re mostly writing about things like global warming."

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