Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben told students at the University of Maine Orono Tuesday that everyday citizens and students can mobilize and make a difference against climate change.
“World history shows that [grass-roots movements are] what it takes when you are outspent and out-influenced by powerful forces,” said McKibben.
McKibben appeared in front of a full audience at UMaine’s Collins Center for the Arts as the the 2014-15 Honors Read Lecturer. His book “Eaarth” was selected as the required summer reading for the Honors Read program at the Honors College. “Eaarth” gave the incoming class of Honors College students the opportunity to learn how climate change has affected the planet they live on in more serious ways than they may have expected.
“I can’t promise you that we’re going to win, but I can promise you that we’re going to fight,” said McKibben to an eager crowd. “This is by far the biggest problem that humans have ever stumbled into.”
McKibben, who has authored 15 books, including “The End of Nature” in 1989, helped create the global climate change organization 350.org in 2008 in an effort to connect the fight on a worldwide level. What this unification did was inherently change the face of the environmentalism movement.
“I was always told that environmentalism was something that rich, white people did,” said McKibben. However, the thousands of people who turned out for their worldwide rallies presented a diverse cultural, racial and economic portrait of what the fight against climate change actually looked like.
In 2012, 350.org along with the Sierra Club and countless other environmental groups demonstrated that the power of people’s movements could have an impact on American politics when thousands of individuals from across the country descended on Washington, D.C., to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The pipeline, if approved by the U.S. government, would carry oil from the tar sands of southern Canada across the central U.S. to oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. In response to the 2012 protest, the largest civil disobedience demonstration in over 30 years, the Obama administration has not yet approved the permit application to begin construction on the pipeline.
Living in rural America all of his life, McKibben has found that “people who live close to the natural world have the easiest time understanding what’s going on.”
It’s our politicians that McKibben says “tend to be the most isolated people in the world, they just spend their whole lives inside of buildings … so it’s sometimes hard for them to see what’s going on.”
McKibben further demonstrated his faith in the abilities of universities when he discussed what he sees for the future of the climate change movement.
“College kids are completely capable of organizing on the scale that we need … the next biggest push of this movement is this divestment campaign and I was really encouraged to get here to Orono and to find out that students are at work getting divestment at the University of Maine.”
Two years ago 350.org started a campaign to get institutions to divest their holdings in fossil fuel companies. Currently, Divest UMaine, a student run group at the University of Maine, is proposing the University of Maine System Board of Trustees withdraw the nearly $8 million of endowments UMS has invested in fossil fuels.
After their initial proposal was denied last winter, Divest UMaine organizers were hopeful for the impact of McKibben’s appearance.
“Having someone like Bill McKibben come here and say, ‘No, you guys are right, this is something that’s important and the student body needs to be involved,’ really [validated] what we are doing,” said Connor Scott, a junior business student and co-founder of Divest UMaine.
Tuesday’s talk was followed by an open discussion at the Donald P. Corbett Business building, where McKibben spoke with local environmental groups, as well as a dinner held by the Honors College at the Wells Conference Center in honor of McKibben’s visit.