Simmer or Boil?

11 Aug 2010 – Mark Lee

In his August 04 post to this blog on The Five Stages of Climate Change Denial, Gary Kendall related how SustainAbility founder John Elkington riveted the audience at the National Liberal Club in London with a keynote cumulating in ‘the warning that inter-generational equity is becoming an increasingly significant sustainability driver, with a potentially explosive sense of outrage rising among young people directed toward the baby boomer generation judged to have acted so irresponsibly with their legacy’.

I agree – first and foremost that baby boomers acted irresponsibly (!), but all the more (and more importantly) that we are on the cusp of a tremendous increase in campaigning and protest, aimed at both corporations and government, as people committed to sustainability find that incremental steps and negotiation either have not worked or have reached plateaus on which we cannot afford to linger.

While pondering this likelihood this week, I found Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org (and whose Hope, Human and Wild, is a favorite), writing online in Grist that, while it is most certainly Time to Get Mad, adequate outrage is NOT present yet precisely because the environmental movement has tried (with absolute best intentions) to find reasonable compromise with policy-makers and corporations on how to tackle global warming when it is an issue on which there can be no compromise.

His prescription?

1. Talk directly about global warming – not about ‘energy independence’ or any of the related, potentially easier to sell concepts that might (but didn’t) bring people on board.
2. Ask for what we actually need. Action. Now. A tax on carbon. Now.
3. A new movement. One that addresses the inability to compete with corporations and lobbyists in monetary terms but that can “work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.”

Finally, McKibben thinks this movement must better express anger, more forcefully “tell the truth, resolutely and constantly [that] fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we’ve got.”

While the saying is ‘truth hurts’, it’s when we get to real root causes that the chance emerges to make change. (And if McKibben’s view has you worked up enough to do something, you might want to join the 350.org 10-10-10 Global Work Party coming in October!)