‘Climate Change Leadership and Changing the Zeitgeist’ with Bill McKibben (Founder of 350.org)
Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. The Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, McKibben was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities.
Zaw sat down with Bill to discuss the most important question that the world has ever faced and the most important battle that human beings have ever undertaken.
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TL;DL
How 350.org got started (1:05) Going from 0 to 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations (4:10). Finding influencers (5:50). Measuring success and key metrics in the fight for climate change (10:00). Defining culture (12:50). Creating incentives (16:18). How do people get involved? (27:16)
Interview Summary
Vision: How did 350.org get started? What was the original mission and vision? (listen here)
I wrote my first book about climate change 25 years ago, and for a long time I thought that writing books and giving talks about climate was my role. I kept writing books and they did well, being published in 25 languages, won Bestseller Awards (see a list of Bill’s books here). At a certain point it became clear to me that we had long since won the argument, we were just losing the fight. That was because the fight was not really about data, research, science…the fight was about power. So to win the fight (to slow down climate change), we were going to have to acquire some power. Now the other side, the fossil fuel industry is the richest industry on earth, in terms of the amount of money that runs through it.
About 7-8 years ago, we performed one of our first demonstrations; based on the fact that 350 parts per million CO2 was the most carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere, a number sadly we’re already well passed (the world is passed 400ppm threshold, permanently)
That was originally myself and 6 undergraduates at Middlebury College. It was the first coming out moment for what’s now become a large global grassroots climate movement. It was the work of me and my colleagues trying to figure out how to facilitate that. Since we didn’t go and organize 5200 demonstrations, we thought of it as having a potluck supper. We’d set the date, the theme, and then people would bring their best to the floor, and we learned a lot about scaling. From there, we’ve gone on to hold about 20,000 demonstrations in every country on earth except North Korea.
Growth: You went from 0 to 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations. How did you put that plan into action, what were the core strategies and tactics that you started with? Was it focusing on finding influencers or other key folks in different countries? (listen here)
The first thing we knew was that we couldn’t worry about control. We couldn’t worry about controlling the brand or the logo or anything else. We took our logo and our message; 350 parts per million (ppm) and 350.org and just tossed it out there. We allowed anyone to make use of it. At the time, it was a difficult step for organizations to take but we had no choice, we had no resources. This was 2008–09 and tech people were describing it as the first open source organizing in the world, and in a sense it was true. We opened up the source code right away and said, “Make use of this however you want.”
It was beautiful to watch. How responsible people were with it all over the world. We’ve never had the slightest problem. It’s been amazing how careful people have been.
Initially, we made the early decision to not have celebrities involved. Our celebrities were going to be scientists and that’s who we quickly got involved. We’re also extremely lucky in terms of timing. If you think about 2008–09, this was the early growth curve of social networks like Facebook, etc., and since everyone working with me was 21 at the time, they were completely prime to go social. It meant that they used new digital (platforms) very quickly to spread the word. However, we were extremely clear that our job was not to get people to simply sign up for email petitions; if we created content online, it was going to matter.
We used the web to set up things in the real world. We’d take all these real events, the images of those events, and use them to make it more than the sum of its parts. For instance, that first day of global action, we had everyone around the world use Flickr to upload images of their demonstrations. We used that content in a variety of ways to reach back out to them. For example, we rented the big billboards at the end of Times Square that normally have whisky ads, etc., and showed these pictures instead…it was quite amazing.
The effect of all this activity was to make what was then still a relatively small movement appear larger than it was, or to make it seem big by geographic dispersal not by sheer numbers. At the time, if we’d told people to come march in New York City, we would have gotten (maybe) more than a few thousand people, and it would have looked small. Instead, we looked big because we were coming from every direction and that was important in our analysis because we thought the thing that made climate action difficult was not that people cared or didn’t care, but the fact that it seemed too big for any of us to make a difference as individuals.
Actually, that’s correct. As individuals, even if we change our light bulbs, we’re really not doing all that much. Our only real hope is to become less individuals for a while, to join together in groups that can force the kind of systemic change, economic, political change, that gives us a fighting chance here.
Measuring Success: How do you track or measure success in the fight for climate change. The ultimate outcome may be to lower carbon emissions, but an inner step might be rallying together a number of demonstrations or participants, what’s the key metric that you think about? (listen here)
As you point out, by the crudest metrics, we’re still losing badly. The amount of carbon in the air continues to go up and may for a few more years, there’s enormous momentum in the system. Our job is to change the zeitgeist. When a movement wins, they win by changing the zeitgeist. It’s very hard to measure when you’ve reached that, except that as you reach it, things get easier. For example, suddenly the idea of same sex marriage is not as far fetched like it was 10 years ago…it’s an obvious idea because of the organizing. It’s because the zeitgeist shifted.
Day to day we measure every kind of metric; how many coal mines we’ve stopped, how many people have sent letters and emails to their senator, how many trillions of dollars we’ve managed to get divested from fossil fuel companies, so on and so forth. Our job is not to focus on those things for very long, it’s to keep moving ahead on every front we can think of with the basic goal of changing the zeitgeist. When that happens, as the world’s mood shifts, it becomes easier to do all the obvious things. Every economist, left, right, center said for 25 years, it makes no sense not to put a price on carbon emissions. Allowing that to be treated as an externality is just a guarantee you won’t get change. That’s true, but the fossil fuel industry is politically powerful enough to keep it from happening so we keep fighting.
Culture: When setting up an organization or looking at one to partner with, how do you define culture? (listen here)
Our culture is to be as open and porous as possible. There was a period in the past when they tended to have great leaders, Dr. King figures alike, where tons of people engaged. Our moment and our movement today is not like that, it’s more like a fossil fuel resistance. The fossil fuel industry itself is protean, it’s sprawling, it’s everywhere so instead of one super hero, we have a swarm of people everywhere standing up to it in every possible way. Everything in our culture is to try and bring that forward and especially to bring forward the leadership of people in those communities that don’t get heard from enough.
Motivation: How do you think about creating incentives for people to grow within your organization and to feel like they’re making a difference? (listen here)
It’s the biggest fight in human history by far and think how hard people are willing to work just to get rich. You know people in the tech community who will work day and night and someday someone will give them a pot of money. Think how much harder you’d be willing to work if instead of getting rich what you were working for was actually something that mattered.
I think we’ve tried to build an organization that treats people well, not monetarily. No one is ever going to get rich or even comfortable doing this. But the real answer is, the rewards are largely intrinsic to the work. Very few people in their lives get to be doing something important about the most important question that the world has ever faced. This is the most important battle that human beings have ever undertaken, and yet there are really only a few thousand people around the world who get to engage in it full-time.
There’s a great deal of intrinsic reward, but there’s also a lot of burnout. We do the best we can to help people with this because it’s not only hard work, but also an emotional subject. The emotional impact is hard but beautiful too.
For people listening or reading, what’s the best way for them to get involved, how do they lend their voice or their time or money, how would you recommend? (listen here)
You have to join with other people in this. There’s nothing you can do on your own that’s going to make a huge hell of a difference. We don’t need to always re-invent the fight over and over again, we’ve got some pretty good organizations now and groups and movements that are fighting pretty effectively and hard. Groups like 350.org are perfectly good places to start and lend your talents and they’ve got independent chapters all over the place and so on and so forth. People need to be a little entrepreneurial just like discovering who it is that’s engaged in this fight and helping out and assuming leadership. We live in an age when people move in and out of battle sometimes and that’s fine. No one can take the constant endless pace working on something this big, so people tend to be in for a year working really hard around some effort like divestment, and then tend to go away for a few months to recoup and regenerate and then come back in.
Interesting Facts About Bill McKibben
- Where is your favorite spot on this planet?
I’m lucky enough to live in my favorite spot on the whole planet. Here in (Vermont) these remarkable close, intimate mountains of the East, that’s where I’m most at home. - What about the opposite of that, is there a place that you think you’ve seen that really shows the impact of climate change?
Places like the Maldives or Tuvalu where they’re going to go under water in the next century. Those places make you sad. The good news is there are people in all those places fighting and fighting hard.
Recommended Read: Rolling Stone - Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math by Bill McKibben
More on Bill McKibben:
Twitter | 350.org | Bio | Publications | Global Climate Change: NASA
Thanks, as always, to Brian Ko (editor/producer) and Gina D. for the help!
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