Global warming knocking at your door
By Bill McKibben | March 20, 2007
THE MOMENTUM in the economy has begun a small, still barely discernible shift toward the local and away from the global.
You can see it in ways large and small: President Bush, touring Latin America, talks less about new free trade agreements, suddenly not as popular either with our neighbors or with the new Democratic Congress. Meanwhile, local food is on the cover of Time magazine -- and on the menu, with italicized encomiums, on every high-end menu. (Farmers' markets, indeed, may be the fastest growing part of the food economy.)
Even money is changing -- in Western Massachusetts residents have launched a local currency that you can get from regular banks, and now they're setting up ATMs.
This trend may continue -- in fact, it may be the trend that defines our time. The last century was about extending supply lines, but this one -- with less cheap energy to drive it -- may be about rolling them partway back in.
If you take global warming seriously, for instance, the prospect of using 36 calories of energy to grow and transport one calorie of California lettuce east doesn't make much sense. Peak oil and climate change alone may mean that the economy will grow gradually less national and global, and more regional and local.
But of course there's a paradox contained in that very sentence. For all of a sudden, the problems we face -- climate change chief among them -- are more truly planetary than anything we've come up against. Is it possible to imagine a culture growing simultaneously more local and also figuring out ways to become more engaged in national and international politics? It is, I think -- and indeed we've done a small experiment in the last two months to try to prove it.
In mid-January, six Middlebury College graduates and I launched a website: stepitup07.org. Our idea was to encourage the first national demonstrations about global warming.
We thought about a march on Washington, but we didn't think we could organize it (and the carbon emissions from all those buses!). So we hit on a local strategy: help people set up rallies in their communities, to engage their congressional representatives close to home and to highlight the local places they believe will be threatened by climate change.
We agreed on a minimal joint message: Congress should pledge to cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, the kind of ambitious and aggressive target that may still do some good.
Instead of just the local demonstrations, we also pledged to link the actions together via the Web to produce, by the end of the day on April 14, a cascade of iconic images from around the country.
People responded beyond our wildest dreams. More than 950 events are planned for April 14 -- it will probably be the largest grass-roots environmental protest since Earth Day 1970. Scuba-diving protesters will gather underwater off the endangered coral reefs of the Florida Keys. People will ski in formation down the dwindling glaciers of Wyoming and Montana, and parade in plug-in hybrids on California highways.
Those images will resonate in their states and congressional districts, and nationally -- hopefully they'll help set the bar high enough so that Congress, and the presidential candidates, can't get away with making token efforts on climate change.
And hopefully those images will spur others to understand that they can make national and international change without having to move to Washington, and without having to build national organizations.
The Internet (especially if it stays the chaotic, democratic mess it is at present, with Congress resisting the efforts of big communications companies to change its architecture) may be ideally suited to a future of local economies and local polities still in easy contact with all around them.
The attractions of the local are obvious -- a town or a city neighborhood is intimate, efficient, human-scale. It's possible to imagine them enduring in a world where expensive oil and climate chaos are disrupting larger systems. But the drawback, in the past, has been that they're also parochial, cut off.
You had to leave Oxford, Miss., or Bremerton, Wash., or Abilene, Texas, to participate in the larger world. That's no longer true -- the few hundred people who will gather in each of those towns on April 14 to demand action on global warming, joining hundreds of thousands of others across the country, presage a future filled with interesting possibility.
Bill McKibben is the author of "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future."
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