Bill McKibben | No License to Give Up

McKibben

I don’t think it requires extraordinary hermeneutical gifts to get at what’s going on there. We’re supposed to take care of each other. We’re supposed to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and we’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. And that’s precisely what we’re not doing in this world. We’re drowning our neighbors at the moment, we’re making them sick, we’re making it impossible for them to raise food on their land where their families have raised food for 50 generations. We’re in clear violation of the Old Testament precepts about stewardship and the New Testament precepts about love.

My name is Bill McKibben. I’m a writer. I’m an environmentalist. I’m a teacher, including every once in a while, a Sunday school teacher.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump. 

Bill McKibben has been a climate activist for almost his entire career. People familiar with the climate justice world know him as the author who first brought these issues to public attention with his 1989 book The End of Nature. But perhaps fewer people know how this work has been borne out of his Christian convictions. We’ve had a number of conversations on the podcast about the severity of the climate crisis and the small window of time left for major change. Rather than rehashing these familiar facts, my conversation with Bill focuses on a few different important themes in his recent book, Falter. It discusses not just climate change, but also artificial intelligence as a threat to the future of humanity. The connection between these issues is fascinating and important. McKibben also relates a good deal of the history and context for how climate change became so entrenched in our culture wars. He doesn’t evade politics in this conversation, but he continually comes back to faith as the foundation for the work that needs to be done, which is to live up to our calling as stewards of the Earth and advocates for justice and shalom. 

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Bill McKibben, welcome to the podcast. I’m very glad to be talking to you.

McKibben:

Well, it’s a pleasure for me as well.

Stump:

So you’re described as a climate activist on the web pages I’ve seen, how did that happen exactly? I don’t suppose as a kid, you used to say, when I grow up, I want to be a climate activist. Give us a little deep background if you would.

McKibben:

Of course, when I was growing up, which was a long time ago, because I’m in my 60s, it would have been crazy to say one was going to be a climate activist, because we didn’t yet know that there would be a climate crisis, it was really only in my 20s, that this, this idea emerged. And I can date it pretty well, because I wrote the first book about climate change when I was 27, 28. It came out in 1989, a book called The End of Nature. And that book, and the thinking that went into it really launched—you know, I’ve spent the rest of my life kind of grappling with this particular horror.

Stump:

Can you look back, though, further, perhaps even into childhood and say, here are some of the experiences you had, or things that perhaps primed you to be aware of these challenges that were emerging, and to have a deeper concern for the natural world in the environment.

McKibben:

My father in particular was a great outdoorsman and lover of the natural world and so, though, we lived in the heart of the suburbs, we spent as much time as we could every summer, out hiking, and in the woods and mountains. But probably more important to me was, in my development, as an activist, was the fact that I grew up in the church and grew up, you know, reading the Narnia books and things and developing the kind of sense that one was supposed to do something about the trials of the world around us. And I’m extraordinarily grateful for that background. It didn’t lead me immediately into working on things environmental. When I was first out of college, I went to live in New York City. And that was right at the beginning of the homelessness crisis in New York. And so for a while, I lived on the streets as a homeless person in order to write about it for the New Yorker. And I started a homeless shelter in the basement of my church. And I think if you’d predicted then that might have been more likely the kind of shape my life would have taken. But then, through almost a series of happenstances, I ended up learning about and then writing about climate change and understanding that it was the most important story and also the greatest injustice that our world had ever seen.

Stump:

What were some of those happenstances that led you to that?

McKibben:

Well, you know, I wrote a long, long piece for The New Yorker, about where everything in my apartment came from. I followed all the lines. You know, I ended up in the Brazilian jungle looking at the places where Con Ed was buying its oil and up in the Arctic, where they were getting hydropower. And out in the Grand Canyon, where they’re mining uranium for nuclear reactors and on the reservoir systems and out with the barges that were taking the garbage and sewage sludge out to see, and on and on and on. And I think what that did, I was probably 24 or 25 at the time, spent a year doing that, it was a very long piece in the magazine. I think what it did was helped me to understand the world is a physical place. I’d grown up in the suburbs and the suburbs are a sort of tool for hiding away the way that the world actually operates. You know, no one has any idea where the water is supposed to flow or any of that. But by the time I was done with that piece, I understood that even a place that seemed as, you know, able to just mint money out of thin air, as Manhattan, was in fact exquisitely dependent on the continued successful operation of the natural world. And that, I think, primed me for reading the early science about climate change. I understood the world as a far more vulnerable place than I had previously thought. And at the same time I was starting to read some of the really great writers about the natural world: Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest, Williams, and also my wife at one point handed me again, by happenstance, I mean, well, I mean, I truthfully, if you asked me to describe the operation, if you asked me to describe what the Holy Spirit was, I would say it’s that force that leads you to read one book instead of another at a particular moment in human history,

Stump:

We can say Providence rather than happenstance, perhaps.

McKibben:

My wife handed me a copy of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the book of Job that NorthPoint press had just published. And it’s a magnificent translation. And it really knocked me over. You know, I ended up actually writing eventually a book about Job. But that story, and that understanding that humans had gotten too big and were now able to sort of taunt God, in a way that Job couldn’t, that was a powerful understanding for me.

Stump:

Hmm. So it’s interesting, you say your book in 1989, The End of Nature, that was really the first book about climate change, at least for a popular audience for the mass audience. But scientists have known since the middle 1800s, that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere creates this greenhouse effect. And they’ve been warning policymakers and even presidents since at least Lyndon B. Johnson, right, about the dire effects of climate change. Why did it take so long for a book like that to come out?

McKibben:

It was really only in the 1980s that we had the computing power to be able to model the climate sufficiently to be able to say, here’s this is not an abstract danger that will happen sometime in the future, perhaps, but to be able to say, this is happening now and we’re now in danger. It was Jim Hanson, the great NASA physicist who really launched the climate era in June of 1988, when he testified before Congress, that humans were indeed heating the planet, and that it was going to be a crisis. And that was the public, that was the moment this became a public issue for the first time. 

Stump:

Hmm, interesting. And you detail some in Falter here, then the efforts by the big oil companies to suppress that and to keep it from having the momentum that it should have.

McKibben:

Well yes, it is worse than that, the big oil companies we now know, from great investigative reporting, and whistleblowers and documents found in archives, that during the 1980s, when Jim Hansen was doing his investigation, they were doing their own. And because they were very wealthy and had great scientists, they were able to understand what was going on. Exxon scientists, by the early 1980s were telling their management exactly what the temperature was going to be in 2020, and just how much trouble we were going to be in. They were telling them that and they were believed. Exxon, for instance, began building its drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level that they knew was coming. But they did not tell any of the rest of us. Instead, they decided to spend huge sums of money across this industry, hiring all the people who used to work for the tobacco industry, to promulgate this sort of litany of deceit and denial and disinformation. And they told a lie and the most significant lie in human history, perhaps, because it’s cost us three decades that we will not get back in this fight. And I think it’s really important to understand just what an ethical aberration that was, you know? On that day that Jim Hanson testified before Congress, had the CEO of Exxon gone on the NBC Evening News and said, “you know what, our scientists are telling us the same thing,” nobody would have said, “oh, Exxon is just a bunch of climate alarmists,” you know? They would have said, “we’ve got to get to work.” And I would submit to you that any ethical or moral code in the world, including particularly, the Gospel code, required the Exxons of the world, at the very least, to speak up and say, “yeah, this is what we’re finding, too.”

Stump:

The details of this just for our audience, the details of this in your book Falter, I think are really fascinating and discouraging, disheartening. But worth understanding, I think, to give us that kind of context. So this conversation we’re gonna have here is going to be primarily about climate change, I don’t really want to take the usual path and simply dwell on how bad things are by citing all the facts and figures, we’ve done other episodes like that you’ve been making that case for 30 years. And there’s a lot of that in the book. I want instead, to push into some other angles on this situation from your book that I think are really fascinating and important. But I suppose just in case anybody is coming into the conversation midway, that, in order for those other angles to have any traction, we do need to feel some of how bad things are. So maybe give us just a quick version of that, how bad they’re going to get. And maybe just two of the ten bullet points, you could rattle off related to this, maybe something from the most recent IPCC report that hardly anybody noticed because of the war in Ukraine here. What’s happening?

McKibben:

Right. Well, look, so far human beings have raised the temperature of the earth one degree Celsius, that doesn’t sound like an endless amount, you know, it’s about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. If you know, go out for lunch, and it’s 60 degrees, and you come back and it’s 62, your body can’t tell the difference. But if you think about it in, in other units, you get a sense of just how much damage we’re doing. So each day, the extra heat that we trapped near the surface of the planet, because of all that coal and oil and gas that we burned, every day it’s the heat equivalent of about 400,000 Hiroshima sized explosions. So when you think about it in those terms, it gets easier to understand how we’ve say, melted most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic. And in the course of doing that, managed to screw up the way that the jetstream works and the way that the Gulf Stream works. The jet stream now gets stuck in big, wide amplitude loops that bring either drought or flood. The Gulf Stream is now slowing significantly as freshwater pouring off Greenland begins to alter its basic mechanics. 

You could go on like that all day. If you wanted one fact to understand what we’re doing, it’s that warm air holds more water vapor than cold. That means that in arid areas, you get extraordinarily increased evaporation and drought. And as sure as night follows day, then you get huge forest fires. We’re seeing fires on a scale we’ve never seen them before. Once that water’s up in the air, it’s going to come down and so it comes down in unprecedented deluges. Unprecedented, I guess, save for Noah. You know, we’ve seen rainstorm hurricane Harvey three years ago in Texas dropped more rain than we’ve ever seen in the US. There were places that got five feet of rain. I was in New York City in August, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida came through and dropped more rain than ever been measured in New York City. A number of people drowned in basement apartments in the richest city in the world. 

So that’s the world we inhabit now. That’s one degree Celsius increase. We’re on a path, unless we make big changes, to increase the temperature closer to three degrees Celsius, five or six degrees Fahrenheit. If we do that, we will not have civilizations like the ones we’re used to having. Simply too much chaos and flux. The UN estimates that would produce a billion climate refugees. The economists tell us that that could produce economic damages, roughly $550 trillion dollars, which is more money than currently exists on planet Earth. So that’s not an option. Our only hope is to hold things shy of three degrees, to aim for as close to one and a half or two degrees as we can still get. And that’s going to be an extraordinary amount of work. But, you know, enough gloom, there are things that are breaking in our favor that we might be able to take advantage of, if we went all out at this point.

Stump:

And the window for doing that. I keep hearing about 10 years we have to figure things out?

McKibben:

Sure. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I wish. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has told us we need to cut emissions in half by 2030. If we’re to make those targets we set in Paris just six years ago. Sadly, 2030 is no longer 10 years away. By my watch. It’s seven years and nine months. So

Stump:

Yeah. Well, your 2019 book was called Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out? For the people who know a little bit about you, they’re not surprised to see that you see climate change as a threat to humanity. But this book also discusses at some length, artificial intelligence as a threat to humanity. And at first when I was reading, it was kind of jarring to cut from one topic to the other. But then there seemed to be a deeper unity to these topics that emerged around the idea of what it means to be human. Can you speak to that deeper concern? Or is it even fair to call it a deeper concern for you, out of which flow these other two issues which are the threats to what it means to be human?

McKibben:

There’s a scale to being human. And we have upset that scale. We’re allowing our technologies, our presence to become too large, out of scale with the world around us. I think we first realized this when we started exploding atomic weapons. You’ll recall that it was Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer watching the first nuclear weapon explode in the New Mexico desert, who turned to the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, for he said, “we are become as Gods, destroyers of worlds.” We’d gotten too large. Now, you know, so far, thank God, we’ve managed to prevent, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another nuclear explosion. And I think it’s because we’ve had the imagination to see those mushroom clouds in our heads and do everything we can to head it off. We didn’t understand that exploding a billion pistons and a billion cylinders every second of every minute of every hour, was going to do damage on the same scale. But it has by raising the temperature in profound ways. And we didn’t, I think, understand that there’s a serious threat of letting our digital technologies overwhelm us, of producing machines that we’re unable to control anymore. And that’s what the increasing number of computer scientists and others are warning us about, in some of the same ways that climate scientists, a generation or two ago, were warning us about what was going to happen if we kept pouring carbon into the air. So I think that, I wish that we would actually grapple with things like the rise of artificial intelligence before not after they’ve become fait accompli.

Stump:

So I’m very sympathetic to the things that you’re saying here and in the book that I read, but let me be a little intentionally provocative just to push you and try to channel what some of the counter arguments might be about this. And with regard to artificial intelligence, I guess I’m wondering if you have explicitly theological reasons for thinking that homo sapiens, and our way of being needs to be preserved, for the counter argument might be that we’ve been evolving for millions of years and came from something else, why can’t we evolve into something else that might have even greater capabilities? Do you need theology to say, this is what creation was headed for all along and needs to be preserved?

McKibben:

Well, I gotta say, I like human beings. I mean, I think we’re an interesting species. But I think the thing that’s most Interesting about us, if you had to catalog what our particular gift was, you know, if the gift for birds is flight, say, our particular gift I don’t think are the things we’ve normally listed, you know, language or toolmaking, or whatever. I think our gift is the possibility of restraint. We’re the only animal that can decide not to do something that we’re capable of doing. And so to me, that’s really is the core of most kind of religious, moral, ethical thinking, at least since the Buddha, the idea that we become fully who we are when we figure out how to limit ourselves, not make ourselves the center of everything, not just blindly evolve in the direction of more power, more stuff for whatever it is. And so it pains me to see us screw up, the ways that we are. And I don’t know whether I mean, eventually, something else will evolve or whatever, but, you know, we were born onto this planet with a particular suite of flora and fauna, and, you know, it seems worth the life work to try and keep as much of that as we can. 

Stump:

Okay, so let me push perhaps even more provocatively, and I hope you don’t take offense at this. But let me connect it to your critique of Ayn Rand, which we find throughout the book here. So you provide a lot of details in the book about government officials and other powerful people and their fascination with the arch individualism of Ayn Rand. And those details, too, are really fascinating and discouraging. And you have this really powerful response throughout the book that steers us away from the primacy of the individual and toward the good of communities. I’m just curious how you respond to someone who might wonder whether you’re doing the same thing, though, at the species level? Could somebody argue that attempting to prolong and maintain the human game is only done at the expense of other creatures, and what is good for the entire community of creatures might not be so conducive to the human game? At least more radical climate activists, sometimes you see pushing for such conclusions. So why are they wrong?

McKibben:

Well, I mean, I, you know, on those terms, perhaps they’re not. But I think that humans are a part of the world that we inhabit and a beautiful part. And I think that we can if we want to stir ourselves to protect the rest of creation around us. And we’ve seen enough examples of that, to know that it’s possible if we can overcome, well, if we can overcome all that toxic mix of vested interest and of, you know, hyper-individualism that we’ve allowed to mark our culture. I think that it’s not humans that are the problem here. I think it’s a particular vision of how to be human. And that vision that comes from people like Ayn Rand, transmitted through people like her acolytes, you know, Reagan and Thatcher, and so on, that, you know, it was Margaret Thatcher who said, “there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women.” These are, among other things, profoundly anti, seems to me, anti-Christian understandings of the world. In fact, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that Ayn Rand reserved her particular dislike for Jesus and all that he stood for. And it makes it all the more ironic that her great followers, Trump, Reagan, won the embrace of so many Christians.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hi Language of God listeners. Here at BioLogos we think that asking questions is a worthwhile part of any faith journey. We hope this podcast helps you to think through long held questions and consider new ones but you probably have other questions we haven’t covered yet. That’s why we want to take this quick break to tell you about the common questions page on our website. You’ll find questions like “How could humans have evolved and still be in the image of God,” “how should we interpret the Genesis flood account?” and “What created God?” Each with thoughtful and in depth answers written in collaboration by scientists, biblical scholars and other experts. Just go to biologos.org and click the common questions tab at the top of the page. Back to the show!

Stump:

Yeah, so we Christians have this theological doctrine that we alone among all creatures are created in the image of God. And I think for some that leads to a strong affirmation of human exceptionalism that we’re somehow set apart from everything else. I think other Christians are more comfortable seeing the continuity between us and other creatures that would fit more comfortably with this vision that you’re pushing here.

McKibben:

Well, I mean, I will say I think it’s obviously clear that we are set apart because we’re able to determine the fate of all that’s around us, by what we do or don’t do. And I think that that, you know, has been a crucial part of our theological understanding, or should have been from the beginning. I mean, look, you only have to read the first page of the good book—and it’s a book that people are more likely to read the first page of than the rest in my experience—you only have to read the first page to get to the point where we’re told, A, that God’s created this world that he really likes, it’s all good. And then that he’s given it over to us for safekeeping to have dominion over, you know? Well, I mean, what failures are we at that? It’s as if you, you know, handed your kid to a babysitter for the evening and you came back and the kid had like, nine tattoos and several piercings, you know? You be like,  “you were a poor babysitter.” I mean, God hand us over a world filled with creatures and we’re wiping them out systematically, at the moment, we’re running Genesis in reverse, were de-creating.

Stump:

So along those lines, you said in the previous book about Job you referred to earlier, I’m quoting you here, “the church, because of its professed values, is the only institution left in society that has even shall we say, a prayer of mounting a challenge to this dominant culture”. I think that the context of that, the dominant culture you were talking about was this environment of constant continual growth in the economic sense. So you made that statement 17 years ago. I was wondering what the years since then, perhaps particularly since 2016, how has the recent activity of the church—or at least professed Christians in our country—how has this left you feeling about the prayer of mounting a challenge to the dominant culture?

McKibben:

Well, in our country, I think it’s actually gone truly badly. And it surprises me that there’s anybody left willing to become a Christian in our country, when you watch the witness that, you know, too many of our faith leaders have undertaken, you know? But it hasn’t gone quite as badly in the world as a whole. You know, look, I’m a Methodist, but I gotta say, the most interesting and engaging Christian leader in the world, by far, has been the Pope in Rome. His encyclical laudato si’ five, six years ago, now, was the best, the most important document yet of the millennia, and the most thorough going critique of modernity that there could possibly have been. And, you know, so that’s one of the places where I hold on to some hope.

Stump:

So part of our work at BioLogos is trying to show Christians that care for the environment isn’t contrary to our theological tradition, but ought to flow directly out of it. And the arguments are typically the ones you referred to earlier out of Genesis, the mandate to be stewards. In your book here Falter, though, which is not explicitly or overtly Christian. That’s not the same argument that I see in there at least. But I think it might just as easily flow out of Christian commitments, and perhaps more directly related to the words and life of Jesus himself. As you say, after you get past the first page page of the Bible to the New Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount, you’re appealing to justice, to equality, that needs to be taken into account here, as we consider what to do in the environment? Is that a fair characterization of your book Falter at least? 

McKibben:

It is a fair characterization of my thinking in general. You know, I don’t think the message of the Gospels is extremely difficult to understand or, you know, ferret out. I don’t think it requires extraordinary hermeneutical gifts to get at what’s going on there. We’re supposed to take care of each other. We’re supposed to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked, and we’re supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. And that’s precisely what we’re not doing in this world. We’re drowning our neighbors at the moment, we’re making them sick, we’re making it impossible for them to raise food on their land where their families have raised food for 50 generations. So we’re in clear violation of the Old Testament precepts about stewardship and the New Testament precepts about love. And I mean, it doesn’t, it seems to me that there’s not an extraordinary amount of commentary needed here. I think it’s pretty clear.

Stump:

So then the question is, if it is so clear, why is there such a disconnect still? Why—and let me try this out to see if you find this persuasive at all because I find this appeal to justice and equality really compelling. I don’t know if you know, the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haight and particularly his book The Righteous Mind, which has shown pretty clearly to my mind that the moral foundations of care and fairness are way more important and persuasive to liberals than to conservatives and that to reach the conservatives. To the culture wars, you have to appeal to authority and purity and liberty. How do you work through issues like that, arguments that ought to be persuasive, but don’t necessarily seem to move the needle?

McKibben:

I frankly don’t know. You know, I don’t really understand the mind that can look at the Gospels and come up with a set of interpretations that we’re provided with now. I don’t get, you know, huge parts of it. I don’t have any idea how anyone reads the Gospels and thinks, oh, this is a, you know, guide for how to make me rich, or you know, any of that. It just seems absurd to me. And I’m so I’m probably the wrong person to ask that question. But I will note that I think that that to fairly small minority of people.

Stump:

What’s the minority?

McKibben:

The minority, that fairly small minority of people who, for instance, don’t care about things like the environment. But it’s a powerful minority. I mean, if we look at the polling around climate change, 70% of Americans now understand that we have a problem and want to do something about it. But the 30% includes the richest, most powerful people in the country, many of them. And it leads me to think that they’re just, you know, reading the Bible to try and justify what can’t be justified in terms of their own wealth and power.

Stump:

Let’s turn a little bit to the economic side of things here. In the book, you critique this desire for continuous economic growth, at least for those people at the very top of the heap. You show in detail how this leads to the degradation of democracy. But lots of people don’t see what the alternative to that continuous economic growth is. I read an article just this morning about the stagflation that’s happening now and is understood to be so awful, at least the unargued premise that only growth is good. Can you give us the pitch or maturity instead of continuous growth that you do in the book here?

McKibben:

Growth is interesting, because of course, growth has a good analog in our own lives. I think the reason, one of the reasons we’re attracted to it as an idea is because in our own lives, the period when we were growing was the most dynamic part of our lives, you know? And that’s as it should be, in an ordered world. I mean, if your, you know, child was 12, and stopped growing, you would take them to the doctor. You know, on the other hand, if your child was 26, and growing eight inches a year, you’d encourage them to go to the doctor too. And I think the point is that, as with the human organism, are there clearly good reasons to think that we should be limiting the growth of our societies. Some of those good reasons have to do with their demands on the physical world around us, you know, it’s not a good sign when the Arctic melts. And part of it has to do with what we now know about human happiness and wellbeing. It’s pretty hard to make the argument that, in fact, the polling makes clear that, Americans say, expressed a higher degree of satisfaction with their lives in the 1950s than they do now. Even though we have on average three or four times as much stuff. That should not come as a great shock to people who read in and take seriously the Gospels, the idea that just having more stuff shouldn’t would not satisfy you, you know? In fact, that seems pretty much a obvious gospel message. But it’s hard for societies to take on. And maybe now, you know, the environmental crises we’re in are beginning to give us some hint of exactly how true it is.

Stump:

So what does a society look like that doesn’t grow? I mean, are we talking here, just GDP or population?

McKibben:

Oh, who knows? I mean, I think, A, we don’t exactly know what it looks like. But we can guess that we might be able to build societies that were at least less focused on growth, that were more local in their economic orientation, lived closer to home, as it were, and that focused on other kinds of growth. On cultures that really work, on letting people become the people that they wanted to be, that took the wealth that we had and distributed it far more evenly among our societies, so that people weren’t driven by need all the time to do the things that they do. It doesn’t strike me that it’s that hard, especially for Christians who have the witness of say, the early years of the Christian church to look back on, and understand that there were many other ways to approach our economic life. And clearly, the ones that the early Christians hit on didn’t look anything at all like our prescription.

Stump:

Well, at the end of the book, toward the end of the book, you highlight two really important technologies that can help us perhaps transition to a more sustainable future: solar panels and nonviolent resistance. Can you tell us how these are game changers? And maybe how nonviolent resistance qualifies as a technology?

McKibben:

Sure. So solar panels are obviously, the classic technology and one of the great inventions of the 20th century. And happily, they’re now, over the last decade, have become about 90% cheaper to the point where they’re the cheapest way to generate power on Planet Earth. You know, that’s a remarkable thing. And having spent a lot of time in, say, parts of Africa where people have never had access to electricity and watching them get it for the first time, by pointing a sheet of glass at the sun, that’s a water into wine scale miracle, you know? It really is. And if we embraced it and extended it to everyone as fast as we could, then we’d be getting someplace. We don’t do that, not because of economic or technological obstacles, we do that because of the vested interest of the fossil fuel industry, which has blocked efforts at every turn and continues to. So in order to overcome that kind of resistance from the powers and principalities of our day, we needed a tool. And the 20th century provided that tool too, you know, from the margins, from the suffragists from Gandhi, from Dr. King, from a million other people whose names we don’t know, comes this remarkable tool of nonviolent movement building. And at its most dramatic apex, the tools that rely on civil disobedience, that rely on well, basically, that rely on unearned suffering. And it’s alchemical power in our world. A line that traces back pretty directly, it seems to me, to Christ on the cross, the sort of example of the example of unearned suffering, that lies at the kind of wellspring of a lot of Western civilization. But it took a lot of other people over the last 100 years to really turn that into the powerful, if still mysterious, force that it is. We’re now told by the political scientists that nonviolent political action is two or three times more effective than violent political action in getting, succeeding with change. We’re also told that if you can get 3.5% or 4% of a society engaged in a project like this, you generally will win because apathy cuts both ways. So I take great hope in the fact that we’re seeing the rise of movements on an ever larger scale and ever more creative scale. You know, the masters of—if you think about it, one of the things that makes the Gospels so appealing is that Jesus was such a master of the art of gesture, you know, washing feet, you know all the different—and we see brilliant examples of that in our world. Clearly that’s what Dr. King was the past master of, you know, and setting up those tableau where gestures were so powerful where the other side was found itself, shooting human beings with fire hoses or setting dogs on them. Thus the world changed. And it continues to this day. Think of Greta Thunberg, 15 year old Swedish schoolgirl, declaring that if her society couldn’t be bothered to prepare itself for her future, there was no reason for her to go to school and prepare herself. So she was going to go on strike, and the ways that that resonated around the planet. I think this is exceptional, exceptionally important technology, maybe the most important technology of all.

Stump:

Interesting and inspiring. So just in closing here, there are difficult choices to be made as a culture. You note many of these. And you end your book Falter by saying “I do not know that we will make these choices. I rather suspect we won’t. We are faltering now. And the human game has indeed begun to play itself out.” That sounds pretty hopeless. But we have to note that you began the book with what you called an opening note on hope, where you say, “I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered writing what follows.” So how do you reconcile those two? And obviously the people who read the book, see more of that. But for our audience here, where do you get off still talking about hope, in light of all that you’ve been saying?

McKibben:

We haven’t given up and we have no license to give up. We’re not, I don’t think, allowed to. And, and indeed, we keep doubling down on trying to do this work. I’ve spent the last two years building this new organization called Third Act, that’s an effort to get people over the age of 60 engaged in these battles for a working democracy and a working climate. And I think that’s really important. I’ve done most of my organizing with young people. But at a certain point, though, I love people like Greta, she’s one of my favorite colleagues and I adore working with her, I’ve begun to think that there was something truly, truly gross about taking the biggest problems in the world and assigning them to 17 year olds, as homework, you know? Like here, you know, in between algebra and field hockey practice, would you please save the world. And it’s immoral. And it’s also impractical because older people have most of the power. We vote in huge numbers, and we ended up with most of the money. So if we’re going to change Washington or Wall Street, it’s going to come with older people leading the way. And that’s been a great pleasure. And it’s been a particular pleasure to see the rise of, we call this outfit Third Act. And one of the most active parts of Third Act has been the Third Act faith working group. Lots of clergy old, you know, retired clergy and things, who have taken on this task with an enormous vigor and enterprise. And which is good. It causes me great pleasure always to see the church beginning to stir itself again, the church that I knew, the one that I grew up in. And and so that makes me think, well, it makes me think anyway, we have no warrant for giving up. Not while we’ve got breath in our bodies. So on we go. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get annoyed sometimes. I find it deeply annoying, that in order to get our leaders to pay attention to clear warnings from scientists, you know, we have to go to jail over and over again and so on. That’s stupid. In a rational world, we would not need to do that. But our world is governed by things other than reason a lot of the time. And so we do need to do that sometimes. And I guess at certain other level, it’s a honor and a privilege to get to do that kind of work too.

Stump:

Good. Where can our listeners find Third Act?

McKibben:

Third act.org, it couldn’t be easier and they’ll enjoy it. It’s a good, you know, are those of us of that age, our first act was pretty interesting. We were around for big, cultural, social, political transformations that we’re now proud of. The rise of equality for women and for people of color and the first Earth Day and on and on. Our second act, you know, perhaps we were slightly more involved in consumerism than citizenship, taken as a whole. But that’s water under the bridge. We emerge into our third act with resources, with skills, with time, with grandkids, and hence, true motivation for not leaving the world a worse place than we found it, which is otherwise going to be our legacy.

Stump:

Oh, very good. Well, thanks, Bill, so much. Thanks for your work, for your books, for your activism. Thanks so much for talking to us today. I hope we can do it again sometime.

McKibben:

All right, many, many thanks to you all for your good witness. Take good care.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Nate Mulder is our assistant producer. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you  will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.