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The Biggest Fight of Our Time
Yes! Magazine / Video Interview
Published: Wednesday 15 February 2012
In which one of the world’s best-known climate activists[, Bill McKibben,] gets personal about the enormous task of saving our planet.
As one of the best-known writers on the world’s most dire environmental problem, climate change, Bill McKibben has long walked the razor’s edge between hope and fear. In 2010, he published Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, a sobering account of what climate change has already unleashed—the ways in which the places we live, the water, weather, seasons, ecosystems, and oceans are changing irrevocably. McKibben also founded 350.org, one of history’s largest and most ambitious political movements, uniting people around the world to fight climate change.
In this interview, YES! got personal with McKibben: Where does he find hope? What role does faith play for McKibben, a longtime Methodist Sunday school teacher? How does small-town Vermont, where the writer now lives, shape his ideas and activism? And what’s the best advice for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of what McKibben calls “the biggest fight of our time”—the fight to save the planet?
Madeline Ostrander interviewed Bill McKibben for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Madeline is senior editor at YES!
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ABOUT Madeline Ostrander
Madeline is a writer and journalist, who brings the sensibilities of an environmental activist and ecologist to bear on the stories she tells about people, landscape, and the possibility for change.
She is the senior editor for YES! Magazine, a national, independent magazine offering solutions to critical challenges our world faces. She holds a Master's degree in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Madeline Ostrander deftly weaves land and people into her narrative, giving us whole worlds, rendering their wounded beauty palpable, and in the very act of putting such stories to paper, offering hope for healing."
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2 comments on "The Biggest Fight of Our Time"
February 16, 2012 7:41am
Yes, but the 99% / Occupy movement has it right, and provides a basis for hope not previously recognized. The see that corporate money is choking our electoral and legislative process, and that our commercial media is more of an impediment that an aid to democracy... and they've developed alternate means -a path less polluted by corporatism. In fact, it's a world-wide phenomenon, lately emergent in the Arab Spring and previous non-violent citizen actions, many based on the methods documented in the work of Mr Gene Sharp decades ago. What a legacy!
February 15, 2012 7:25pm
I share the concerns McKibben has been educating the world on. However, people have arranged their affairs by instituting governments of all stripes, which have become completely unresponsive to this singularly important issue facing the planet. I hold out little hope for even the smallest of measurses to amelioate climate warming
The neo con nihilist capitalistic system, or any system for that matter is controlled in all thought and action at the core by money. The power to create money and credit runs and owns the world. Until this power is taken from the banks and reinvested with the people, all the people's aspirations regarding this primary life ending man made disaster will come to nothing. Of course the bankers could get their collective heads out of their asses and pursue remedies as in their best interests, but will they in time? The power the bankers control runs all thoughts and actions to any degree that counts. We must have this power back if we are to save life on this planet.
google "The Money Masters" and watch the video to understand the man made power that controls all mankind.