Reimagining Our Future: Co-Founder of 350.org BILL McKIBBEN & Author of The Activist Humanist CAROLINE LEVINE on Climate Action - Highlights

Legendary climate activist Bill McKibben and scholar Caroline Levine discuss divestment. McKibben relates his long struggle to get companies to divest from fossil fuels and for the world in general to act immediately to seriously and substantially address this existential crisis. Levine tells of her efforts to get the giant pension fund, TIAA-CREF, to divest. She also talks about her new book, The Activist Humanist, and its relation to both her teaching and her activism.

Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.

McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.

Caroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for an understanding of forms and structures as essential both to understanding links between art and society and to the challenge of taking meaningful political action. She is the author of four books. The most recent, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), grows out of the theoretical work of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA, and named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). Levine has also published The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007).

BILL McKIBBEN

Viewed one way, we live in a very hopeful moment. Thanks to in large part the work of university scientists and engineers, we now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That is to say, we could run our Earth on energy from heaven instead of hell, and we could do it fast. The fast is the hard part here. The only difference between all the examples of the long victories of social justice activism that we're in now is that this one is a time-limited problem. If we don't solve it fast, then no one's got a plan for how you refreeze the Arctic once you've melted it. And so we have to move very quickly. Our systems are not designed to move quickly. It's the easiest thing in the world to slow down and delay change, which is all that the fossil fuel industry at this point is trying to do, and that means that it's time for maximum effort from all of us. The story to tell is that the planet is outside its comfort zone, so we need to be outside ours.

So, of course, I've been working on climate issues for a very long time. I wrote the first book about climate change way back in 1989. We then called it the greenhouse effect, that's how old I am. At a certain point, maybe 20 years ago, it became clear to me that I would need to do more than write books, and that the clear warning that scientists were providing was not proving to be enough to change the outcome here. And that's because the enormous power of the fossil fuel industry was resisting it at every turn. They were engaged in a campaign of delay and denial and disinformation. So we started forming movements to try and build some power of our own, not with money, but with seven students here at Middlebury where I teach we launched a thing called 350.org that became the first big global grassroots climate campaign. We've organized, we think, about 20, 000 demonstrations in every country except North Korea. We had a few big projects to begin with. One was helping spearhead the fight against the Keystone Pipeline, which became the sort of great environmental battle of the last decade in a lot of ways. And the next after that was to start this divestment campaign. The idea really was hatched by my friend Naomi Klein and I. We'd both been reading the latest science, which showed that the fossil fuel industry had in its reserves and that it planned to dig up and burn roughly five times as much carbon as any scientist thought we could safely absorb.

In other words, these were rogue companies. Their business plan spelled complete disaster for the planet. Both of us had been college students in the 1980s. And so Naomi and I thought back to the last time there had been a kind of big, obvious class of really rogue industries, which were the ones supporting the South African apartheid government in that country. And we thought about the effectiveness of the divestment campaign in helping draw attention to and eventually drive those companies out of that line of work. So, we decided to see what we could do. One of the first things we did was ask Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of South Africa who had won the Nobel Prize for his work on that campaign if it was okay to borrow the idea. And he said, "Please, you know, if apartheid was the human rights question of the last generation, then climate change is the human rights question for this one." So we wrote a long article for Rolling Stone that went very, very viral and that became the foundation for launching a kind of tour of, first this country, then Australia, New Zealand, and then Europe. And we do big programs, you know, for many thousands of people at a time to explain to them the logic of this campaign and then to get them enlisted in it.

The one in the U. S. in the fall of 2012, we visited 29 cities in 30 days or something like that. And by the time we were done, there were several hundred divestment campaigns underway on college campuses. And it soon spread to foundations, to pension funds, on and on and on. It's been extraordinarily successful by many measures.

There are universities that actually have a sort of deeply defined moral mission. often religious schools and they were easier to move than others. There were places that only responded when civil disobedience came into play, and I think those are places that are exquisitely worried about their image and what it looks like, and so on and so forth.

The best harvesters of this divestment campaign were the students on universities who worked on it who got trained up and psyched up and became incredible. When they got out of school, they wanted to keep working on climate change. And so veterans of the divestment campaign formed this thing called the Sunrise Movement.

And it was the Sunrise Movement that brought us the Green New Deal. And it was the Green New Deal in a kind of boiled-down form that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act, the first significant work that Congress ever did. You know, the woman who was the Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement for its first 10 or 8 years or something, was a woman named Varshini Prakash, one of the great activists in the world who I first knew when she was, I don't know, 17 and running the divestment campaign at UMass Amherst. Going to jail, winning an early victory there, and she and, and many, many, many others of that cohort went on to really do us proud in their work.

It's absurd to let people who are actively wrecking the planet be an effective part of the university community, whether it's through investing in them or, in many universities, letting them come in and build centers and institutes designed to forward their own interests.

This, by this point, is such a toxic industry with such an insane impact. The temperature in 2023 was higher than it's been in at least 125,000 years on this planet. almost entirely due to the efforts of the fossil fuel industry. I mean, if we're serious about civilization, which theoretically universities are the flower of, then we better get our act together fast.

Outright climate denial is almost impossible unless you're Donald Trump or somebody. There've been too many fires and too many floods and too much heat, but the new form of effective denial is delay. Science tells us now that we have to move very, very fast to have any chance of dealing with this. And instead, the fossil fuel industry is doing everything it can to preserve its business model for a few more decades, even at the cost of breaking the planet, which clearly will be the cost. So, this is just another one of these cases where the facts make clear what we need to do. And, as Al Gore said a long time ago, those facts can be inconvenient.

Cornell has some of the greatest climate scientists in the world. The fact that we understand what methane is doing, and methane is 35 or 40 percent of the heating gases in the atmosphere, is down very largely to a man named Bob Howarth, who's a professor at Cornell. And what a dishonor to his research and work that it doesn't occur to the university administrators to at least get rid of the stock in the very companies that have spent the last 20 years trying to discredit him, trying to prevent his work from being understood and appreciated and so on.

CAROLINE LEVINE

And because the climate crisis is so urgent, I felt like I had to kind of change my humanistic approach, to not delay any more. But how do you then rush us when that goes against our very principles as humanists? And I think there's something true across the whole university about this, you know, that scholarship is supposed to be slow and rigorous and thoughtful. And it should. I don't think that that's wrong, but how do we then urge ourselves into quick action? So part of my work has been to kind of think about what practical action we can take that will have an effect that could actually move us in a given direction without selling our soul as scholars or as humanists or as artists. And it seems to me there's a tremendous amount that can be done, but 350.org is one of my models throughout the whole book, which is to say: how do you get a lot of people talking together? Well, in the humanities, we've also been very insistent on making sure that we honor real difference across the world, right? We don't homogenize people. We try to really give a full spectrum, and that occasionally gets in the way of everybody speaking together. So, how do you do it in a way that doesn't destroy the differences among people, but still gathers us together?