Street roots
Sept. 13, 2013
CHANGING from page 4
percent from what it was. And that that
number will be 30 percent by mid-century.
That’s pretty profound, if you think about it.
That s pretty much the most basic measure
of what humans need to do, have to do, want
to do. For somebody who can just escape
into an air-conditioned office and sit in front
of a computer, it’s not as immediate. But for
people who are on the streets or who are in
a Bengali field, Liberian market garden, or
on a plantation at work, it’s harder than it
used to be.
S.Z.: In your April 2013 piece in the
Warriors, traditional warriors from every
country, had the slogan “We’re not
drowning, we’re fighting.” You should
Google it because the videos of these guys
are amazing.
They’re in as tough a situation as it gets.
They’re in poor countries to begin with, a
couple of meters above sea level.
They understand that they have to reach
out. They can’t do it by themselves so that’s
why they’re involved in big global network
like 350.org.
S.Z.: You founded 350.org. Tell me about
the organization.
Rolling Stone, “The Fossil Fuel Resistance”
B.M.: It was designed by necessity to fit
you referenced a study from the University of
with the world in which we now live. It’s
Delaware from December that showed that by
dispersed. We run these big days of action
2030 “we could affordably power the nation
where we’ll have 5,000
99.9 percent of the
demonstrations in
time on renewable
5,000 places around
energy.” Why doesn’t
the globe. We leverage
every home and
those to make them
business in America
^Radicals w ork at o il
more than the sum of
utilize solar and wind
companies« T b e /re w illin g
their parts. We’ve
power?
been quite successful
to alter chemical
in the educational
B.M.: Because the com position of the
bent. I think we’ve had
system that we have
atmosphere even though we about 20,000
makes it difficult to
now fatow it has melted the
demonstrations.
make this transition.
In the last couple of
The thing that makes A rctic and It w ill i o l^OOO
sure that system
other te rrib le things« Mo '60s years, we’ve tried hard
to also take that
never changes is the
radical had am bitions
education and make it
enormous fossil fuel
r*
anywhere near that big.
really tell, make it
industry. Their
really turn into some
political power and
kind of power. So
their ability to force
we’ve fought very hard
the status quo into a
on this fight over the
kind of stalemate are
Keystone Pipeline.
profound. That’s why we fight hard against
the fossil fuel industry in an effort to break
that stalemate.
S.Z.: What’s the significance of the number
350?
S.Z.: Germany set a fantastic example
recently.
B.M.: Yeah Germany, having been
responsible for more than its share of 20th
century woes, is doing it’s best to step up
and solve some of this century’s biggest
problem.
It really is impressive to go there. There
are, by last count, more solar panels in
Bavaria than there are in the United States.
This in a country that really isn’t well known
for its sun. Very few people set out for their
sun soaked vacation on the shores of Ulrich,
Germany.
S.Z.: For which geographic locations is it
too late in terms of climate change?
B.M.: I’m uncomfortable announcing
doom for everybody because everybody
everywhere (in the world) is trying really
hard and nobody wants to think of
themselves as a victim.
Our friends that we work with a lot on the
islands of the Pacific Nation of the Indian
Ocean are adamant. They did a great day of
action this spring across the Pacific Island.
B.M .: 350 is probably the most
important number in the world, but nobody
knew it until about 2008.
That’s when our premier climate scientist
Jim Hansen and his team at NASA published
a paper saying we now know how much
carbon in the atmosphere is too much. Any
value for the CO2 greater than 350 parts
per million is not compatible to the planet
on which civilization developed and to which
life on earth is adapted. Yikes!
We took that number (as our name)
because we wanted to dramatize how
serious the problem was.
We are already past 350. We are past 400
this year. That’s why the Arctic (glacier) is
melting. But we also needed a name that
would work around the globe and Arabic
numerals do that.
People around the globe now understand
that we’re too high. We have too much
carbon in the atmosphere.
S.Z.: Not only that, but as I understand it,
the resources that governments have that they
are planning to use far exceed anything viable.
B.M.: If we did what governments have
currently announced they are planning to
do, that number will reach 550, 650 parts
per million in our lifetime. At the moment,
as a planet, we’re not planning a serious
response to climate change.
S.Z.: You are one of the few employees of
(demand).
Radicals work at oil companies. They’re
willing to alter chemical composition of the
atmosphere even though we now know it
has melted the Arctic and it will do 1,000
other terrible things. No '60s radical had
ambitions anywhere near that big.
350.org that is over 30 years old.
S.Z.: The efforts you have led, or
B.M. There are only a few of us. And I’m
not an employee - I’m a volunteer.
S.Z.: Why the focus on youth?
B.M. That’s just where we started. 350
started (with) myself and 700 graduates of
Middlebury College in Vermont - which is
where I hang out. And they now run the
whole operation. Basically, they always did.
They’ve just kept hiring young people,
mostly because we don’t have much in the
way of money. But also because our style
and way of organizing is, as I said, very
dispersed and young people have an almost
visceral understanding of the connected
world because they grew up with the
Internet in a way that I didn’t. So they are
aware of the possibilities. It doesn’t daunt
them as it would have daunted me to have
to go out and be in Vermont at the age of 22
and figure out how to organize all of East
Asia by yourself — 1,000 demonstrations in
the course of a year. They have a sense of
the world that allows them to do that.
S.Z.: What kind of footprint do the
electronic devices that we covet and use and
own leave on the planet?
B.M.: More than they need to. And we
can design them more efficiently. But, in
general, they are pretty good substitutes.
For instance, you can do a 1,000 Google
searches with the amount of energy that it
takes you to drive your car about half a mile.
Learning to travel via mouse rather than car
or plane would be a big improvement.
S.Z.: Civil disobedience. You are borrowing
a page from history and the civil rights
movement. Tell me a bit about some of the
actions that you have been a part of.
B.M.: It’s one tool in the activist toolkit.
As with all tools, you don’t want to overuse
them because they become dull.
We pulled off what was the largest civil
disobedience action in this country in 30
years when we did the first round of arrests
around the Keystone XL Pipeline.
It was very civil, civil disobedience.
Everybody was in dress or jacket and tie.
One of the reasons was we wanted to show
that this was a big, powerful moral issue. At
the same time, we wanted to demonstrate
that we were not radicals in any way. I
mean, all we’re asking for is a planet that
works a little bit like the one that all human
beings know about - all human beings of the
last 10,000 years, which is how far back our
history goes. That’s really not a radical
demand. It’s pretty much a conservative
participated in, have been responsible for the
stalling and blocking of the Keystone XL
Pipeline.
B.M.: So f a r ...
S.Z.: So far. Then there is Enbridge and the
Eastern Gulf Pipeline and another Trans
Canada project that was announced recently to
bring a pipeline East across Canada.
B.M.: I don’t think they are going to get
any of these built. I certainly don’t think
they will get any of them built without huge
opposition.
They’ll keep trying. There are trillions of
dollars of crude up there in Alberta. So
Koch Brothers, et. al., will keep trying to
make their investments pay off.
But they are being fought at every turn.
The Canadians have already beaten the only
other pipeline that had any other real
chance of being built. The so-called,
Northern Gateway Pipeline. The rest are
just proposals on paper someplace. And
there is a huge, sprawling coalition of
indigenous people that are involving all of
the rest of us and making life hard (for the
fossil fuel proponents) at every turn.
We can’t, however, just play defense
against bad projects. We also have to fight
offense against this industry.
We have a big divestment campaign,
which is spread widely.
S.Z. What does our future look like, in your
opinion, 100 years from now if we do nothing?
B.M.: Hot and damp and pretty miserable.
Basically, our civilization will be mostly in a
kind of an emergency response mode.
S.Z.: And if we take climate change
seriously?
B.M.: Hopefully what it looks like is a
much more localized world - with dispersed
energy instead of centralized energy. That’s
a beautiful, much more democratic kind of
world.
S.Z.: What can the average person do to
make change on a small, but meaningful level
to address climate change in his or her
community?
B.M.: They can organize.
S.Z.: What about the naysayers?
B.M.: This is why we have science. We
are able to study and look at what all of the
thermometers tell us around the world.
That’s the useful thing about science.