Ordinary People Rallying Around Science
Just in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Bill McKibben’s 350.org campaign is enlisting support in the form of candlelight vigils. McKibben recently spoke at Ann Arbor’s Rackham Auditorium, at an evening sponsored by the Ecology Center. The author of the first general-audience book on climate change (The End of Nature, 1989), his new organization recently pulled off what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” It was October 24th, in case you missed it. There were 5200 “events” in 181 countries. Much of McKibben’s talk was devoted to this – including images from around the world (literally: all over) of groups and individuals holding 350 signs, or arranged in formation, often near a monument or picturesque spot (the pyramids, Sydney’s opera house, an underwater Cabinet meeting in the Maldives). They were not, he pointed out, exclusively photos of the stereotypical members of the eco-movement. They included 15,000 people in the streets of Addis Ababa – where there is no internet. It seems to be new territory – CNN may not have much data on the second most widespread day of political action: “No one but Coke and McDonald’s tries to organize globally,” says McKibben. The 350 message is not simple, but the graphics are, and McKibben and his six graduate students appear to have spread the word wide and deep into parts of the world where climate change will have its first effects. In the Maldives, President Mohamed Nasheed forced his Cabinet underwater for a photo shoot because most of the country is only a few feet above sea level, and may not exist much longer. Preparing for Copenhagen, Nasheed has said he is unwilling to sign any deal he feels amounts to a “suicide pact.”
According to McKibben, the Earth’s atmosphere contained about 275 ppm of carbon dioxide for “all of human history,” until the time of the Industrial Revolution, about 200 years ago. At the moment, that number is 390 and rising 2 ppm yearly. Scientific study arrived in January 2008 at the conclusion that 350 ppm is the target number. Above that is, in scientific understatement, “incompatible with the Earth as it is today” – and would result in the amplification of existing temperatures: hotter hots, colder colds, floodier floods, etc. The droughts in Melbourne last year are not being viewed as a “disaster,” but instead “the new normal.” The Arctic sea ice is melting 30-40 years ahead of a schedule made not long ago, and the demise of the Tibetan glaciers which feed the Ganges River would threaten one in three people. In the world. This is an idea of what it’s like to spend the evening with a self-described “professional bummer-outer.”
What to do about all this? “As well as the scientific method has worked,” McKibben says, “the political method has worked badly.” As the October 24th event suggested, there may be more power (moral authority) outside of the United States on this issue; until environmentalism can be seen as something other than a luxury indulged in by “rich white people,” it will lack both moral authority and the attention of the fractured media. Perhaps the young (b. 1967) president of the Maldives will make more headlines than the young (b. 1961) president of the US in whom we are still hopeful that he will remember to pack his audacious along with his winter gloves for the trip to Denmark.
Which brings us back to candlelight vigils. Could they help? Inform yourselves, if you’re interested, at 350.org. Check out the photos from October 24th: http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/collections/. You will see many of what McKibben calls “ordinary people rallying around science.”
Or check out the competition – Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, for example, declares in his EPW Press Blog that he’ll be bringing “a truth squad” to Copenhagen, because if it can’t be spun for political gain, it really will be the end of the world as we know it.
The Ann Arbor evening, it should be mentioned, featured the Ecology Center’s Mike Garfield as emcee, and the awarding of the Herbert L. Munzel Award for Environmental Activism to Jeannine Palms. She is community organizer at the Blossom Preschool Wet Meadow Project, the Buhr Park community garden and the Initiating Group of Transition Ann Arbor. The Ecology Center, its sister organization Recycle Ann Arbor, and the Healthystuff.org website are all local organizations worthy of exploration. And with Garfield’s reminder that Ann Arbor was the site of the first Earth Day’s largest turnout (50,000 people), maybe there’s a candlelight vigil just waiting to happen.
