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Bill McKibben
Interviewed by Mike Agger on June 13, 1996
No matter where we live, we are going to have to figure out ways to do it much more maturely than we do now.
Bill McKibben is author of "The Age of Missing Information" and "The End of Nature." His newest book, "Hope, Human and Wild," discusses true stories of human communities that have managed to "live lightly on the Earth." Tripod recently spoke to McKibben at his home in the Adirondacks about the recovery of the Eastern forest, the dangers of "Baywatch," and the importance of staying in close contact with the natural world. You can catch part of the actual interview in Real Audio.
Tripod: How did you get your start as a writer?
Bill McKibben: I worked before I got to school for local newspapers and mainly what I did when I was at college was write for the newspaper. Harvard had an independent paper called "The Crimson", a wonderful, six-day a week paper entirely run by students. That was my main life there. From Harvard, I went off to "The New Yorker" magazine to write "Talk of the Town." This was the old "New Yorker", in a different era.
Tripod: What do you mean by the "old New Yorker"?
McKibben: A man named William Shawn was still the editor, who'd been editor for forty years or so, and it was still independently owned, it hadn't yet been bought by S.I. Newhouse. I worked there until the day they told Mr. Shawn to leave and I moved up to the mountains and began writing books.
Tripod: Why did you feel you had to leave New York City to write your books?
McKibben: I felt that it was an apropos moment to leave "The New Yorker". I had a wonderful time in New York City. I had one of the great jobs in the world to get to explore the city and I explored it. I was ready to do something else. Manhattan, more than any other place on earth, is on some level built on paper and hype and image and all of that. It was very useful to me to reacquaint myself with the physical world, where things are still more or less built on solid ground.
Tripod: Did you grow up in the city or the country?
McKibben: I lived in many places, but I grew up mostly in the suburbs.
It's easier for me to get a bagel here in the Adirondacks than it was for me to get a mountain in Manhattan.
Tripod: Why did you choose to move to the Adirondacks?
McKibben: They are a large and protected wilderness, the biggest wilderness in the East. At the time, it was also very cheap to move here which was helpful, too. It is also a good place to write because it's quiet, and if you love the woods and the mountains, it's even more convenient than the city, because you are closest to the most important things. It's easier for me to get a bagel here in the Adirondacks than it was for me to get a mountain in Manhattan.
Tripod: How did writing "Talk of the Town" develop into your current focus on environmental topics?
McKibben: I wrote a long piece for "The New Yorker" about where everything in my apartment in New York City came from. I traced the electricity back to oil wells in Brazil where ConEdison was buying its oil. I also traced the cable TV line, what happened to the sewage when it left the house, the natural gas pipelines and other things. The piece acted as a good reminder of the physicality of the world. From that, it was pretty natural evolution. I'd also been reading a lot of Ed Abbey and Wendell Berry and other mighty writers.
Tripod: I am asking all these "town v. country" questions because your new book, "Hope, Human and Wild," begins by telling about the recovery of the Adirondacks and then shifts to two densely populated urban areas to find the ideas that will help preserve this recovery. Could you talk more about the role of cities in preserving the countryside?
McKibben: One of the good things about the predicament in which we find ourselves ecologically is that because it is so large, there is plenty of good stuff to be learned from anybody who is trying anything new and interesting. Cities can be inherently efficient places for an obvious reason: large concentrations of people living close together. When you find them where they have developed wisely (i.e. without automobiles as the main thing), then you get a sense that Americans don't usually have, of what that efficiency is all about. Cities become deeply pleasant, instead of becoming something to flee. That sense of people managing to live close together was very important to me. Making good common sense decisions that put the good of the whole above people's own individual predilections. Some of those principles are certainly transferable to other places. I guess the point is that no matter where we live we are going to have to figure out ways to do it much more maturely than we do it now. In the country that means learning once again to be responsible for more of our own food supply, not relying upon flying it in from around the world.
We are building a critical mass of people who are ...willing to change their lives and to imagine changes in our society.
Tripod: How does a community begin to act with more environmental responsibility?
McKibben: There has to be a small but significant critical mass of people who are interested in these things. That's how I see most of my environmental work at the minute. It's clear that until we have a larger crisis than we face right this minute, we are not going to have mass organization or change in our ways of life. We are building a critical mass of people who understand and care about these issues and are willing to change their lives and to imagine changes in our society. So, when push comes to shove, as I am pretty much convinced it will pretty quickly, there will be a fighting chance for a humane outcome.
Tripod: Do you think that the world, or at least the United States, needs some sort of environmental catastrophe to galvanize it into action?
McKibben: I interviewed Al Gore not long ago. He said, "We are in an unusual predicament in global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary," which is an astute summation. Until we have something more to focus our understanding, that calculation will not change. That focusing event could come at any time. It might have come already. We had seven hundred people die in a heat wave in Chicago. That was an eye opener for some people.
Tripod: To what extent do you find that this kind of environmental consciousness is generational?
McKibben: Each generation that comes along is more ecologically aware than the one before, however, at the same time, the newer generations are that much more enmeshed in the media world, that much more socialized to consume, to "want stuff." They are that much less equipped to take pleasure from the natural world, and from other people, and have spent too much time looking at one kind of screen or another. It will be an interesting race to see which one of those socializations wins out.
I am thirty-five. I am in the middle, neither young nor old. Looking in all directions, I see plenty of examples of wonderful conservationists who have been around a long time. The new president of the Sierra Club is twenty-three and the man who built the Sierra Club, David Brower, is in his seventies, and every bit as active as someone fifty years younger. I don't think that being environmental is generational, although there is a better chance for more people in the next generation to have been exposed to these ideas.
We live in the first generation of people that get more of our experience of the world mediated than through contact with the natural world or other people.
Tripod: Getting back to your comment on "screens", you mention "Baywatch" in your book as one of the more pernicious exports of American culture. To paraphrase your argument, a world audience watches this show and desires the lifestyle offered there. This desire for more stuff ultimately translates into environmental harm. Could you talk more about how television shapes people's environmental perceptions?
McKibben: I wrote a book a few years ago about television and the environment, entitled "The Age of Missing Information." I thought a lot about television then, and decided that it and all its attendant technologies were remarkably important in shaping the ways that we understand the world. Not so much in terms of poor environmental information, but in terms of mediating our experience for us at all times. We live in the first generation of people that get more of our experience of the world mediated for us second hand than we do through contact with the natural world or other people.
Listen to Bill McKibben's response when asked if the Internet would fulfill its educational promise, with Real Audio! If you haven't downloaded the free Real Audio 2.0 player yet, hurry on over to Progressive Networks and hear what you've been missing.
Tripod: I've read the "Age of Missing Information," and often wondered if you spent twenty-four hours on the Internet and then twenty-four hours on a mountain, if you would have reached the same conclusions about the Internet as you did about television.
McKibben: I don't know enough about the Internet to know for sure. I've had people show me around it a few times. Where we live it is still a long distance phone call to access it, so we are not overly tempted. One always has hopes that new technologies will change things and that there will be a different outcome, but from what little I've seen I'm afraid that a lot of it strikes me as all too close to 57 channels and nothing to watch.
Although we have tremendous amounts of data falling past us all the time, we have a deep problem with lack of access to knowledge or wisdom or understanding.
Tripod: A lot of the early rhetoric surrounding television talked about what an educational medium it would be, how people would watch five plays a week and become extremely literate as a result. These same sorts of educational promises surround the Web. A common anecdote tells of the small, rural library that will be able to access and download any volume in the Library of Congress.
McKibben: This posits a view of the world in which our main problem is lack of access to information, which doesn't seem to me at all the problem. Seems to me that although we have tremendous amounts of data falling past us all the time, we have a deep problem with lack of access to knowledge or wisdom or understanding. Those things are unlikely to come from clicking on to something, because they require the hard wonderful work of thought, of imagination, of talking with other people to understand your own heart. I don't mean to be a technophobe about it all. If there are people who feel as if they are becoming wiser and more able to help the world in some interesting way through the Internet, then more power to them. I fear that for most people its more likely to be one more distraction.
Tripod: I assume by distraction, you mean a distraction from our immediate physical surroundings, the world outside, and the people who live nearby. In your book you discuss the need to make education more local, maybe you could talk more about how this is done in the Adirondacks.
McKibben: We do a poor job, here anyway, and probably in most rural areas, of exposing people even to the place where they already are. Our town is seventy percent wilderness, but you can go through the school system without ever having spent a night outdoors. Without looking up at the stars. People tend not to. Like most parts of the world, people do not appreciate where they are. They have been told so often they should be someplace else. We are trying very hard to change that. I know lots and lots of people up here who are working on these things. We're starting small schools, or trying to help the one college in the Adirondacks grow into an institution that takes its curriculum from its location. These are tremendously exciting things to be thinking about.
Tripod: One of my other great discoveries while reading your book was your discussion of the "other John," John Burroughs. Burroughs, a contemporary of John Muir, argues that the nature right in our backyards, the trees, the birds, the plains, are as equally beautiful and inspiring as the peaks of the Rockies or the valleys of Yosemite. His call to appreciate the nature nearby seems particularly appropriate today, when we are often told, at least in the East, that the "last, best place" is in the West, or any place but here.
McKibben: You don't need splendor. There are amazing amounts of splendor almost everywhere, though smaller in scale. We take very little notice of it all too often. We don't make it one of the focuses of our lives. We should be especially vigilant in noticing it now because we may not have it in as much glory for all that much longer. What we see now may be, in some ways, the peak of the natural world as far as human beings are going to be able to see it for quite awhile.
What we see now may be, in some ways, the peak of the natural world.
Tripod: Why do you say that?
McKibben: We are going through tremendous crises of extinction. We can expect that global warming will change significantly the flora and fauna around virtually every place on the planet. We are pressing this old world hard and it is beginning to show some real signs of strain.
Tripod: I think everyone is alarmed and saddened when they hear such dire forecasts about the fate of the earth. What do you tell people to do, when they say "I hear your message, I want to help"?
McKibben: It is important for people to be outside and appreciating things and paying witness to them. That's key. It is also key to be restraining oneself and one's society in ways that might allow some of the rest of creation to continue to prosper. They are questions we all ask ourselves. How are we going to live, at what level? How many kids are we going to have? Things like that.
Tripod: There is a point in your book where you discuss how every action we take on the earth leads to an oil debt. If I buy a new novel, I use two quarts of oil. It seems a self-defeating way to think about how to live. Everything I do degrades the earth so why try and change?
McKibben: No, there are dozens of things you can do that do not degrade the earth, that have just the opposite effect: growing a garden, working in a homeless shelter, working to pass environmental laws or electing people who will pay some attention to the predicaments that we are all in. These are things that honor the earth and human society. In terms of consumption, it's important for us to confront it in our own lives, since we've been raised to consume. It's not necessary to feel guilty, but it is necessary to be aware that we live in a high consumption society. The question, I guess for me, is not only the ecological damage it causes, but the question of whether or not the levels at which we consume actually make us happy in the ways that we would want them to. I think for many people there is a growing recognition that there must be something more to it than this. In "Hope, Human and Wild," I was trying to get at the pleasures of some different ways of living in this world.
At its best, travel broadens the mind, makes you think hard about where you live and how you live.
Tripod: Travel is a good way to learn about "different ways of living in this world." How did you draw the ecological lessons out of the places where you were visiting? How do you be a good traveler?
McKibben: Travel is a very mixed blessing, for both the people you are traveling to and for yourself. At its best, travel broadens the mind, makes you think hard about where you live and how you live, but for that to happen you have to escape. Most travel is to places and to hotels that attempt to recreate as closely as possible that from which you have come, only in a warmer climate. You don't have to go hippie backpacking everywhere, but you do have to make sure you're out in somewhat of the same world that the people you are traveling around are living in. I think that the most important thing to do is not to look for novelty, but try to get to one or two places and stay there for a long time, until you begin to pick up the rhythm of whatever place you are in. That's how I like to travel.
Tripod: The places you visit in your book are in Brazil and India. What are some models of "living lightly on the earth" that can be found in the United States?
McKibben: There are places all around. For instance, there are now five hundred community supported agriculture farms around the country. Places where people pay money to a farmer in the spring and go out every couple of weeks to help harvest whatever is growing that week. That is their communal vegetable garden for the summer. These farms are a wonderful way in your local community to travel regularly into a different world. There is a good spot to begin it seems to me.
Tripod: Before I wrap things up, I would like to say that I found your book inspiring, and it made me want to live my life closer to the natural world, to have a more "elemental" existence. In reality though, we all have to work jobs to support ourselves, often spending much of our time indoors, in waiting rooms, in airplane terminals, anywhere but outside. What would you say to people who want to live simpler lives closer to nature?
McKibben: Far be it from me to give advice, but this is something that writers have to learn early on by force of circumstance. You can make ends meet two ways in this world. One is to increase income and the other is to reduce expenses. Choosing the latter course allows you a great deal of independence, and as far as I can tell, it allows you at least as much pleasure anyway. You get a lot of what you are calling "elemental experiences." You learn to cook instead of to eat out. You learn to walk where you live instead of taking cruises.
Tripod: To close, what is the one message you would like to leave with?
McKibben: Stop reading right now. Nothing you will read here is anywhere near as important as what you will learn if you just go outside and have some fun.
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