Q&A with Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature (1989) was ahead of its time as the first book for a general audience about global warming, a topic he continues to write about for many publications, including The New York Times, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, Grist Magazine, and
Rolling Stone. In his latest book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), McKibben examines the unintended and intertwined consequences of fossil fuel dependence and economic globalization. In the summer of 2006, McKibben organized the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history, starting with a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming. With the help of six college students, McKibben expanded this campaign into a movement known as Step It Up, which involves an annual climate day of action intended for people to initiate environmental activism in their community and to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, in Vermont, where we interviewed him in July 2007. In light of McKibben’s view that relocalization is essential to creating an ecologically sustainable future, we wanted to hear his thoughts on studying abroad. You can watch the complete video interview here.
—Sherry Schwarz and Stacey Woody Thebodo
Abroad View: Please tell us about your own international travel experience and how it has influenced you.
Bill McKibben: The first time I went abroad was to Brazil as a young reporter for The New Yorker. And, of course, I've spent my life since doing reporting in all parts of the world, all of it in the worst possible way—that is I really don't speak any language but English, so I always have translators with me. But, it's been some of the most important work I've done not just because of the things that I've seen but because of the way it allows you to come back and look at your own place and understand its strengths and weakness, and escape from the idea, the deadly idea, that the way you are used to having things happen is the only way that they might work. For me, education is not about stuffing people full of new ideas; it's about making them doubt whether the things that they already know are in fact true or not, or as true as they think they are.
For example, I went off to Kerala, in the south of India. It was, by the ways we measure these things, a very poor place: per capita income was $350 per year. But, it has a life expectancy equal to ours [and] literacy rates higher than ours. It’s the kind of place that makes your mind hurt trying to figure out why it doesn’t fit any of your stereotypes about how the world should work.
I spent some time for a book called Hope, Human, and Wild in Curitiba, a Brazilian city that has more than tripled in population in the last 30 years. We all know what Third-World cities that triple in population are supposed to look like—millions of people living in cardboard boxes on the edge of downtown—but in fact this may have been the most livable city I’d ever visited. It probably had the single best bus service in the world. How is this possible, what did it mean, and what lessons might it provide? I did a story for New York magazine comparing riding a bus there and riding a bus through mid-town Manhattan, and what the two experiences were like; and, why was it that [the bus service] in this Brazilian city [with a metropolitan region of about three million people] worked infinitely better than the one in the richest place in the world?
AV: You have written that equally important to individual human efforts to fight global warming is stronger, tighter communities. How does study abroad fit into this? Are students who study, volunteer, or intern abroad more connected to other people and cultures around the world?
McKibben: Here’s one of the things that I think we need to understand, which is that America is a very anomalous and odd culture and society. We’re used to it. It seems obvious to us that this is the way people would live, but in fact it is a very weird experiment, mostly in what I would call “hyper individualism”: people widely disconnected from each other, living far apart in huge houses. We have many fewer friends on average than people around the world, we spend endlessly less time with families, neighbors, and relatives. It turns out that this is probably an ecologically inefficient way to run a society. The fact that we have to live in 5,000-square-foot houses and drive every place we go is a big ecological problem. It’s also a big problem, as it turns out, for our happiness. Americans turn out not to be particularly happy compared with people in other parts of the world, apparently because there’s a loss of community and context. So for me, what’s great about study abroad is the chance to go sense for a little while how other people live and how other people have always lived.
I have very little interest in the kind of study abroad that replicates as closely as possible the American college experience in some city with great museums or whatever, if that's the point of it. It doesn't seem to me that that's worth the jet fuel. But it seems to me unbelievably worth it when people see how the rest of the world actually lives. And, by the rest of the world I mean the 80 percent of people who don't really look like or live like Americans. And more than anything else it's that sense of tightness and connections, in other places and among other people that, when I talk to kids [after] they've come back is the thing that really struck them.
If you are lucky you get to places that have a different take on the world. You get to India, or to Tibet, or any number of places where people have a different set of senses about what's important. It's unsettling, and it should be unsettling. The only point of education is to be unsettling, because everyone arrives at school now with 18 years of conventional wisdom drummed into them, so they have a fixed but completely wrong perception of the world and their happiness. It needs to be unsettled.
AV: You have stated that the average Western European uses only about half as much energy as the average American. How can study abroad students adopt some of the more sustainable practices that they are exposed to when living abroad and implement them when they return home?
McKibben: Let's just be completely practical. Here are a few examples. In most other places in the world, when you need food, if you're not growing it yourself, you go to the market—and they're wonderful. They are the opposite of a supermarket, you know the sort of sterile place with packages of corn syrup in different shapes. It's real people, real food; it's delicious, it's noisy, it's fun...it’s all those sort of things. I'm sure that one of the reasons that farmer's markets are now the fastest growing part of the food economy in this country is that enough Americans, especially young people, have traveled to the rest of the world to begin to get some sense that there are things better than the Stop & Shop.
Our sense that everyone is and should be headed in our direction makes it extremely difficult to be very educated about the world. One of the great problems about living at the center of empire, as we do in America, is that information travels out but it doesn't really travel in. It's very hard to get a sense of what's going on in the rest of the world. No one goes to Kerala or Curitiba and writes about it much for the newspapers or TV. Instead, we spread with ruthless efficiency our idea of what the good life is out in that direction. And to overcome that you've got to get out and see what the world is like.
AV: Study abroad by its very nature includes extensive travel—on planes, buses, trains, cars, etc.—all of which emit CO2. Students’ presence in their host communities also has implications for the peoples, cultures, and environment supporting them. Can we justify study abroad?
McKibben: Look, travel has become a thorny problem now for environmental reasons. In the last few years, as we’ve learned about the extent of climate change and global warming, it’s gotten much harder to just blithely dismiss getting on an airplane and flying around the world. That one airplane trip to wherever you are going requires the consumption of more fuel and more carbon than most people in the world will use in a year for all the tasks of their daily life—not to be taken lightly.
There are things you can do to lessen the impact a little like buying carbon offsets for your trip, but one shouldn’t pretend they are taking care of this problem. To me, the only excuse for travel of that kind is to go someplace, see something different about how to live in the world, bring it home, and do something about it. Travel that just allows you to replicate your life here in America but in a warmer climate is no longer a really supportable idea.
That's why study abroad probably is the single most important kind of travel that people can be doing, if it's being done in a context where the administrators and teachers are exposing [students] to the rest of the world, not just shutting them up in a classroom in London and taking the occasional trip to the British Museum…all the sorts of ways that we used to do study abroad. But if people are out in the real world seeing what it means to be a human being in the 21st century and what the possibilities for that are, and especially if they're out in the 80 percent majority world of people who are dealing with real issues of poverty and environmental defoliation and sensing how those people are dealing beautifully with all those things, then it's not just okay, it's a real environmental gift.
Most people take planes where they are going, but once you get there one of the things you quickly establish is that almost everywhere in the world has a much better train system than the United States does. And if people bring home no other piece of information than that the United States has a train system that wouldn't be fit for Bulgaria, that's a useful piece of information to have brought home. So you've got to figure out how to live as lightly as you can, especially because you've just wasted all this carbon getting across the ocean to wherever you're headed.
AV: Global warming seems like such a daunting, intangible issue to many people. What concrete actions would you encourage people to take?
McKibben: One of the most important things anyone can do at this point is organize politically. The scale of the problem is so large that we [need to] get change first out of Washington, and then internationally, in some forum that the United States begins participating in again. The good news is that around the world…pressure is building for real change. The United States has a lot to offer; we have interesting technologies, but we have a lot to learn from the rest of the world too. The rest of the world has technologies to offer, some of them high-tech and some of them low-tech, like how to use bicycles to get people around big cities. [The world also has a lot more to offer than we do] in habit and lifestyle terms—how do you live on half the energy that an American does and live a life that is at least as dignified as ours? This question alone can be more than the basis for six months of fruitful study abroad. If I found myself in Belgium or England, or somewhere, for six months that's to me the interesting question you could be asking, and it would be very useful for people to be thinking hard about that.
AV: How can study abroad professionals prepare students to travel and live abroad more sustainably?
McKibben: The short and sort of obvious answer is that people always need to be reminded carbon is a precious commodity. Most of the developing world is only now beginning to use fossil fuels in appreciable quantities, and there are places where it is being done wisely and places where it isn’t. Most countries have some mix of both, and we need to train students to look for this...the use of energy in the world is the single most important question we have. It is really powerful to go to Western Europe and see windmills spreading from horizon to horizon. If I were sending students to Western Europe, which is, as I say, probably less important than sending people to the developing world, that would be one of the very first things I’d have them focusing on and realizing “every person you see is literally using half as much energy and having half as much impact on the planet as you are.” Now figure out if that’s because they’re leading deprived, unhappy lives or because they’ve figured out better ways of arranging their lives to make that happen. This is a useful and important question to plant in people’s minds as they head abroad.
AV: Is there a model of study abroad you prefer?
McKibben: There was nothing more important in the development of human rights consciousness and environmental consciousness and many other things in this country than the return of the first generations of Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s. These were people whose lives were changed, and then they went and changed this country in profound ways. It's because, partly, they were actually out there beyond the cocoon of easy, it's-just-like-home and everything-is-going-to-be-taken-care-of-kind-of travel, which is the most important kind of travel you can do. You can't do it completely in study abroad; there are things that get in the way of that, but you can get closer. You can push the envelope more than we are, and then when people come home, they should come home changed. If people don't come home changed, then it was a waste of money and a waste of carbon. If you can travel to someplace different and not have it change you, there's something wrong with the pedagogy that was going on.
Figuring out how to balance some of the legitimate safety needs of study abroad with the much more important need of people for real experience and immersion strikes me as the most interesting challenge for administrators and teachers of these kind of programs.
AV: Do you feel that the benefits of cross-cultural encounters outweigh the environmental and social impacts of traveling abroad?
McKibben: The benefits of that cultural encounter outweigh it, if there's actually a cultural encounter going on. If there isn't, if you're just there to do what you'd be doing at home in a slightly different place, then it's just travel like everybody else is doing. I do think that it is the most legitimate use of jet fuel that we've got, and it's not completely clear we'll be able to keep doing it all that much longer. There's not an endless supply of oil as it turns out.
[As] global warming becomes a more pressing and pinching problem…one of the things people need to see when they go abroad is the effects of that on people around the world, especially people living closer to the margin than we are, [people] who are going to be effected even more dramatically by a changing earth. One of the things they need to be prepared to understand is their own deep implication, in that the 4 percent of us who live in this country produce about 25 percent of the CO2. We’ve been doing it for a century; we’re responsible for way more than a third of global warming. We’ll be the preeminent cause of this for many decades to come no matter what China does.
One of the most useful things about going abroad [now] is to understand how many people really don’t like Americans or America, and not to have a knee-jerk defensive reaction but to listen to what the reasons are, because at least when it comes to things like global warming and our unwillingness to participate in the international efforts to do anything about it, it’s easy to understand why people feel this way. It’s useful to be told you’re hurting more than you’re helping, and to pay some attention to that.
AV: Why is it important for students returning from abroad to share their experiences?
McKibben: If you don’t come back and are not outspoken about it with others than much of the value of your experience is wasted. Everyone around us needs to understand what the world really looks like and how it really operates. Something like only a quarter of Americans even hold passports. Our sense that the rest of the world either is just like us or wants to be just like us is a big problem. It leads us down many blind alleys. So when people come back and tell people, in as many formal and informal ways as they can, what they saw and what the differences were, that’s really useful. If people come back and say “I got sick while I was on study abroad and went to the hospital and nobody asked for my insurance papers, they just took care of me, that’s a useful thing for Americans to understand. I was in Copenhagen for four months, and I didn’t get into a car once. There’s no need to. These are all things that are useful for us to understand.
And people also come back understanding the things that are really useful about our culture, or should…the ability to be outspoken…the good parts of the sort of individualism that we take for granted but not everybody does elsewhere—being able to understand and strike those balances is really important. One of the great clichés of the world is that nothing educates more than travel, but in fact it’s probably pretty close to true, as clichés go, mostly because you find yourself thinking about your own way of living in a way that you never think about your own way of living normally because it’s just normal. It’s just obvious that this is what you would do. But as soon as you are exposed to the idea that it is not obvious and there are other ways of doing things, then you start to have interesting sorts of insights about your own way of life.
All interesting travel tends to be walking the line between being comfortable, safe, and secure and getting far enough out into the world to see what it really looks like. There are certain dangers (e.g. I was hiking back from Bangladesh once with dengue fever, which is nasty business. It certainly helped me understand how much of the rest of the world lives.). When you doubt in travel, err on the side of getting farther out; it’s usually safer than you think, and it’s always more interesting than you can imagine.
AV: The 49-mile walk for climate change that you organized in September 2006 led to the creation of Step It Up. What inspired the walk?
McKibben: I was in Tibet [in the summer of 2006]. Every time you would turn a corner in the road you would see in the distance someone prostrating [himself] on the way to Lhasa or Mt. Kailash. [I was also] in village India [where you can’t travel far] without running across reminders of Gandhi and the great Gandhian pilgrimages. That was in the back of my mind when I [returned] to Vermont in sort of despair about how little was happening politically with global warming, so we organized this march up the western side of Vermont to Burlington, and by the time we got to Burlington there were about 1,000 people marching. It turned out to be probably the largest demonstration to that point about climate change in the United States and very effective politically.
In some sense this [walk and Step It Up] traced back to the experience of being abroad and being reminded how other people think about taking action, what walking might mean, and the need for real, powerful witness, in a kind of Gandhian way, to the problems at hand. There are great resources out in the world for learning how to take action in all kinds of ways. For those of us who are interested in political change, it’s extremely useful to be out [in the world] studying how people have done it in other places and other times and to bring some of those echoes back here and adapt them to our place.