Springing Into Our Future

Although many parts of the country won't believe it, today is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox. It's a day that should, far more than St. Patrick's Day, bring out the green in us all. I'd love to see it declared an international day to make committments: personal, community, national, global, to going yet one step further in making changes in the way we are living on this earth. We are beset on all sides by so many problems that we may regard as more immediate than the results of global climate change, that it is hard to look at this as what it truly is: the biggest problem humans have ever faced. For my vernal equinox celebration I'm going to link to Bill McKibben's article in Yes Magazine Online, First, Step Up. Bill begins with the same thoughts I've just voiced:

At any given moment we face as a society an enormous number of problems: there’s the mortgage crisis, the health care crisis, the endless war in Iraq, and on and on. Maybe we’ll solve some of them, and doubtless new ones will spring up to take their places. But there’s only one thing we’re doing that will be easily visible from the moon. That something is global warming. Quite literally it’s the biggest problem humans have ever faced, and while there are ways to at least start to deal with it, all of them rest on acknowledging just how large the challenge really is.

The body of his piece goes on to tell us quite graphically just how huge the challenge is. In fact, it's so big that we/ve never figured out another way to so fully degrade the future for everyone who comes after us, with the significant exception of all-out thermo-nuclear war.

After McKibben gives us the picture of just how vast the problem is, he goes on to give us ways to step up to the plate and do something about it. It's nothing you haven't heard before in many other places. But so succinctly and passionately put, so clear and obvious, that it's impossible to ignore. When Bill says:

We need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement—as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the automakers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change
...
It will need to work much better, though. We’ll need to see a whole new level of commitment—to nonviolent protest, to electioneering, to endless lobbying. We’ll have to be committed to an environmentalism much broader and more diverse than we’ve known—younger, browner, and insistent that the people left out of the last economy won’t be left out of the new one. And we’ll need to see it not just here but around the world. Because they don’t call it global warming for nothing. If we’re going to have a fighting chance, we’ll need every nation pitching in—which means, in turn, that we’ll have to understand where we all stand right now.

I want to drop every single other thing I'm comitted to right now and become a fulltime fighter in this environmental battle. McKibben (one of my longtime environmental heroes) is coming to Albuquerque next week to speak about his latest book, Deep Economy. I will be there, you betcha baby, front and center, with the book in my hand.

Technorati Tags: Bill Mckibben, Deep Economy, energy future, global climate change, spring, Yes magazine,

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