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54 The Ecotone interview Bill McKibben is a writer, environmentalist, and founder of Step It Up 2007, an organization that sponsored rallies in hundreds of American cities on April 14, 2007, to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution eighty percent by 2050. McKibben’s books include The End of Nature (Random House, 1989); The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Eerdmans, 1994); The Age of Missing Information (Random House, 1995), a comparison between twenty-four hours of one hundred cable television programs and twenty-four hours on an Adirondack mountaintop ; Hope, Human and Wild (Little, Brown, & Co., 1995); Maybe One (Simon & Schuster, 1998), a discourse on human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously (Simon & Schuster, 2000); Enough (Times Books, 2003); and Wandering Home (Crown, 2005). His most recent book is Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books, 2007). McKibben is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The New Yorker, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships and the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing. In 2006, McKibben helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming. He currently resides in Ripton, Vermont. 55 David Gessner: Believe it or not, we are only a couple years away from the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The End of Nature. In that book, your first, you presented a powerful overview of the science of global warming, and an implicit (and explicit) argument that something had to be done about it immediately. Well, here we are two decades after you were researching that book and not a lot has been done. Just a couple of days ago an international scientific study called global warming “irrefutable,” but the majority of Americans still don’t believe such a thing as global warming exists. Al Gore has a hit movie but policy, if anything, seems to have gone backward. What do you make of where we are right now? I have read enough of your work to know that you are no Cassandra, but has there been a personal frustration in having this knowledge and seeing others ignore it? Hope has been a theme of your work but there must be periods where you feel some hopelessness at people’s unwillingness to see the evidence in front of them. Bill McKibben: For long periods I have, I confess, despaired a little. I never thought it would be easy (The End of Nature is not exactly an upbeat title) but I’ve been dismayed by how little has happened, how easily the powers that be have swept the problem under the rug. But those days are over. We’re clearly making real progress in the last couple of years—hurricane Katrina blew the door open, Al Gore walked through with his movie, and by the time they were done the education process was very nearly complete. Now we’re at the movement-building moment, and that’s going well too. I kicked off the organizing for a march across Vermont last summer—by its end we had one thousand people walking. Which was a lot for Vermont, but it was also the largest demonstration about global warming yet in this country, and that was pathetic. with Bill McKibben David Gessner 56 Ecotone: reimagining place With that in mind we launched Stepitup07.org in early January. We asked people to organize rallies in their communities for April 14 (instead of a big march on Washington—too much carbon!). We thought, maybe, we could organize a couple of hundred of these actions. But by mid-February we’d blown by the 650 mark. There are sororities and retirement communities and national environmental groups and churches and rock-climbers and you name it—people were simply waiting for the opening to make their voices heard. It’s been unbelievably moving and inspiring. Gessner: Place has obviously been paramount to you in your life and work. You now teach at Middlebury College, not too far from the Adirondack Mountains that you have written so...

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