Booted up. McKibben loves his rural Vermont home, but climate activism keeps him on the road.
(2 of 4)
Born in California and raised in Toronto and Massachusetts, McKibben followed the path of his journalist father. He was hired fresh out of Harvard by then New Yorker editor William Shawn. It was a plum job that McKibben quit out of solidarity when Shawn was fired in 1987--not the last time McKibben acted on seemingly impractical principles. He and his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, moved to a cabin in the New York Adirondacks, where he wrote his first book, 1989's The End of Nature, about climate change. The tone was grim, but he was still optimistic. "I assumed the system would swing into gear automatically to start solving the problem," he says.
That didn't happen. McKibben spent years watching with amazement as science was undermined by corporate interests threatened by the prospect of carbon cuts. He now realizes it was foolish to assume that Washington could be moved by science alone. McKibben is normally subdued, but when the conversation turns to the politics of climate, his voice rises and his eyes widen behind rimless glasses. "While the scientists were talking patiently into our leaders' ear, the fossil-fuel industry has been screaming into the other," he says. "We're no closer to dealing with climate change than we were in the late 1980s."
McKibben always assumed it was "someone else's responsibility" to translate his ideas into activism. But a reporting trip to Bangladesh several years ago changed his mind. The low-lying South Asian country is uniquely vulnerable to climate change, and while there, McKibben--stricken by dengue fever--mused on the injustice of poor Bangladeshis suffering for the wealthy world's carbon habit. "If you try to measure the carbon footprint of Bangladesh, you'll barely get a number," he says. "There was this guilty part of me that said I had to do more."
So McKibben turned to organizing. With his close-cropped hair, he looks more like a monk than a leader. But he also has a talent for inspiration. "People just gravitate toward him because of his sense of storytelling and narrative," says Jamie Henn, a 350.org staffer. In the summer of 2006, McKibben led hundreds of people in a five-day walk across Vermont to demand carbon cuts, in what may have been the nation's biggest climate demonstration to date. He also began working with some Middlebury students who were using the Internet to rally grassroots climate action.
Soon after, McKibben learned from NASA climatologist James Hansen about new research indicating that the world needed to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at 350 parts per million (p.p.m.) to avoid dangerous climate change. (We're already at 392 p.p.m. and counting.) Atmospheric carbon concentration hardly makes for catchy protest slogans, but McKibben saw the number 350 as a clarion call, comprehensible to a global audience without translation. His Internet-savvy friends helped him take the idea worldwide. In October 2009, 350.org organized more than 15,000 rallies in 180 countries. It was likely the biggest mass rally in history.