Today is 350.org’s International Day of Climate Action, during which people around the world are trying to call attention to our need to bring the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back down to 350 parts-per-million (ppm). A noble cause, to be sure — but can we actually do it?
According to CO2isgreen.org (and .com and .net) all of this extra carbon pollution we are spewing is good for both us and the Earth! What luck! I’m getting a Hummer!
We can protest coal-fired power plants all we’d like–but must not forget the importance of conservation. Conserving energy has an immediate impact.
On March 2, Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry are asking for large civil disobedience at the Capitol Power Plant in Washington D.C. Why, cuz Clean Coal sucks!
Over 2,000 people are expected to risk arrest. And the protest comes on the heels of the upcoming grassroots action — Powershift 2009 — which will bring 10,000 young people to the capitol for two days of training and lobbying.
Bill McKibben, well known for his environmental writings, has compiled the foundational writings of American environmentalism and stuffed them into a 1,000 page epic tome that anyone with a green bone in their body would love to add to their bookshelf.
Editor’s note: John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist, the authors of Ecopreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet Before Profits, are both contributors to sustainablog and other GO Media network blogs. Despite our relationship, I was excited about their new book, and agreed to write a review. I’ll try not to let me relationship with John and Lisa get in the way of a fair and impartial assessment.
Ditch high-paying (and high-stress) corporate careers for a Wisconsin farm house, a more sustainable lifestyle, a portfolio of small businesses, and much less money. Sound idyllic to some… and crazy to others. As I noted in my review of their earlier book, Rural Renaissance: Renewing the Quest for the Good Life, John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist made the jump from Chicago ad executives to rural bed and breakfast owners… and have never looked back. Their newest book, ECOpreneuring, focuses on how they continue to bring in income while creating a life centered on home, family, and environmental restoration, and provides guidance for others that want to recenter their careers and lifestyles around their environmental values.Already, you should be able to tell that this is no ordinary business book — in fact, I’m not even sure I’d call it a “business book.” ECOpreneuring contains plenty of advice on starting a small, eco-conscious business, but the authors focus primarily on how entrepreneurial efforts can incorporate values and priorities beyond the bottom line. Lifestyle choices trump profit motives, but neither have to be sacrificed in order to create meaning and income.
Fighting global warming isn’t going to take one person. It isn’t going to take even a few people. Or organizations. According to Bill McKibben, famed environmental writer, it’s going to take the whole world…and a number.
Bill McKibben is the founder of Step It Up, what some have noted as the largest American demonstration about climate change to date. He is also an author and frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering.
Remember the scene in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando’s character, the crazed Colonel Kurtz, tells Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) of the shock he felt upon realizing the strength of his enemies?
“And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we.”
That same bullet struck me recently while reading Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Her argument: that the U.S. government and now, ever increasingly, multinational corporations not only view disasters as fortune-making opportunities but actually work to hasten the onset of such opportunities, whether through coups, economic strong-arming or willful neglect (think New Orleans).
I just stumbled across this video of the well-known author, activist, and environmental scholar Bill McKibben explaining that, while he has been actively supporting Barrack Obama as part of “environmentalists for Obama,” he thinks the most important task at hand is to elect a Democrat to the White House.
McKibben is a champion of the environmental movement and he made it clear that policy action on climate change will require broad-based and sustained political support for it. (Running time 4 mins.)
Nearly three years ago, I took note of Bill McKibben’s Grist essay calling for more artistic expression about climate change, and lamented the most popular offerings on the subject at the time: the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and Michael Crichton’s global warming conspiracy novel State of Fear. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to read one of the latest efforts to address climate change within the framework of popular fiction, Marvin L. Zimmerman’s The Ovum Factor. This “eco-thriller” is the author’s first novel, and he demonstrates a real talent for spinning a page-turning yarn: I read the book in two sittings. Despite the story’s fast pace, though, Zimmerman succeeds in creating a work that a reader may finish quickly, but won’t simply put down afterwards. The thoughts that reader may have upon finishing The Ovum Factor, though, often won’t necessarily coincide with the author’s intentions..
Zimmerman’s protagonist, investment banker David Rose, isn’t particularly unique: like a number of John Grisham main characters, he’s successful, but unfulfilled. He’s looking for meaning in work driven almost solely by profit margins. Ironically, it’s the head of the firm for which David works that provides him an opportunity to find such meaning: billionaire Isidore Steinmartz sends the junior associate to Southern California to assess a project underway by Cal Tech professor and Nobel prize-winner Charles MacMillan. The project is titled PANDA, an acronym for Project for Accelerated Neural Development in Anthropoids. In short, MacMillan is studying how to increase the brain’s development during gestation, and produce super-intelligent children. Steinmartz, a member of an elite secret society charged with watching for, and heading off, the extinction of the human race, believes a generation of such beings will be needed to tackle the massive ecological challenges facing the planet and humanity.
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