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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 13, 2013)
Changing attitudes B ill McKibben has pursued the truth about global warming for more than 25 years. It's up to all o f us to catch up. BY SUE ZALOKAR S T A F F W R IT E R o matter where you live on the planet, you are most certainly noticing intense and changing weather patterns. There is much debate about what that means and how to interpret all of the empirical data that scientists have collected for decades. Bill McKibben has been writing and lecturing on the topic for more than 25 years, practically introducing global warming to a new generation. More recently, he has participated in and organized acts of civil disobedience to bring attention to the global warming crisis. Last month, a leaked draft of the United Nations upcoming report of the U .N . Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that scientists are convinced that human activity is behind the increase in global temperatures. McKibben is currently the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont. He volunteers for 350.org, a climate change awareness and activist group that he founded in 2007. I first asked him about his experience many years ago, working on story about homelessness for The New Yorker, which is that. It was a pretty remarkable and also how he happened to meet his wife, Dickensian operation. I spent some time at author Sue Halpern. another place called Palace Hotel. Which was one of the last of the real Bowery flophouses Bill McKibben: I’ve done a lot of in New York. In those days, if you had $3, reporting on homelessness for The New you could have a cot. They were all lined up Yorker. This was back in the days when next to one another with men sleeping as homelessness was still a phenomenon in though in one long bed. If you had $5-, you America, at least in the way that we thought could have a cot inside a little chicken wire about it. cage — which for obvious reasons was At the time, we thought about it as a preferable. I didn’t generally have $5. crisis. It needed to be covered all the time in One of my take aways from that the media. And we thought it was like a new experience was that being homeless was one thing that was going to go away, that we of the hardest jobs in the world. I was never would, as a society, quickly figure out that we so tired. didn’t want hundreds of thousands of people living outside. S.Z.: You’ve said that “it’s already too late to I wrote some pieces about it and I spent prevent global warming. What we have to do some time living as a homeless person. I also now is learn how to deal with the reality. ” What started and ran a homeless shelter in the is the reality? basement of my church that served 10 men each night. B.M .: Well, it is too late to prevent it My (now) wife had been doing a lot of altogether, but it is not too late to keep it fundraising for groups that were working on from getting worse than it can get. We’ve the homelessness crisis - that is how we raised the temperature one degree so far met. « and that’s going to cause us untold problems. One of the great tragedies is that people We’re almost certainly going to raise the have stopped thinking about homelessness temperature two degrees — there is already as a crisis and have started thinking about it enough momentum in this system to all but as something that just happens. It is just an guarantee that. That will cause us more than indelible part of American life. There are twice as many problems. those of us old enough to remember that At one degree, we have already melted the that wasn’t always the case. That it was Arctic. So that should give you some idea of shocking when it first started emerging. the stakes that we are playing with. There is no happy outcome. We’re probably still at a Sue Zalokar: What was the experience like place where we can maintain the planet. But - sleeping on the street? that only happens if we take swift action — much swifter than governments are planning B.M .: It added up to weeks I stayed - to get us off fossil fuel. If we don’t, the outside. My editor asked me to find out what same science that told us about one degree it was like (to be homeless) and in those now tells us with confidence that it will be days, at The New Yorker, there was plenty of four or five degrees before the century is time to do things. I’m trying to think about out. I’m talking Celsius here, so that would the various places that I lived actually. The be eight or nine degrees Fahrenheit. So, the Armory close to 158th Street. In those days, stakes are really high. We have to prevent if I’m remembering this right, that place that change from happening even as we’re slept 5,000 people a night, if you can imagine N adapting to the change that we can no longer prevent. S.Z.: 2012 was the hottest year on record since we started keeping track. What do the facts tell us about the m eaning o f this? B.M .: It’s a very good year to think about. It got really hot in the U .S . and there were two very dramatic results. One is that we can no longer grow food in the most fertile land on earth. It just got too hot in the summer of 2012 to grow corn in Iowa across the grain belt. Beyond a certain temperature, it is too hot for corn to fertilize. The price of grain went through the roof and a lot of poor people around the world had a lot less to eat than they wanted to as a result. Another dramatic thing that happened - well there were a bunch of dramatic things - was wildfire season and this season has already been worse. * The other truly dramatic event was Hurricane Sandy. It was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded North of Cape Hatteras. It was the largest wind field we’ve ever measured in a hurricane. If anybody ever had any doubt before that whether climate change was a serious threat to a highly developed technological civilization, watching the New York City subway system fill with seawater should have answered that question once and for all. S.Z.: What effect does climate change have on poor people? B.M .: For poor people everywhere, it is particularly hard. A study came out in January from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. It said that we ve already reached the point where it is hot and humid enough that people’s ability to labor and be outdoors is cut about 10 See CHANGING, page 5 P H O T O C O U R T E S Y OF BILL M C K IB B E N
