Bill McKibben says we're stuffed

We've eaten, developed and drilled to near oblivion, says the environmental writer. It's time to realize that having more stuff is not the road to paradise. Oh, really?

By Ira Boudway

Read more: Books, Environment, Interviews, Economy, Authors, Global Warming, Books Interviews, Climate Change, Peak Oil

March 23, 2007 | Bill McKibben has been writing about global warming and the recklessness of oil-addicted economies since George W. Bush was a part owner of the Texas Rangers, Al Gore was the junior senator from Tennessee, and informed adults could still speak of climate change as hypothetical. If the stretch of history that has followed seems all too familiar, so will many of the players in McKibben's new book, "Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future." You'll recognize the ticking time bombs (climate change and peak oil), the villainous corporations (Wal-Mart and ConAgra), the do-nothing politicians (pretty much all of them), the consumerist and apathetic citizenry (pretty much all of us), the cadre of witch doctors with their trickle-down pablum (the Federal Reserve and the World Trade Organization), and of course the plucky heroes (small farmers and grass-roots activists). But with "Deep Economy," McKibben does more than just stage another culture-war drama. He offers both a compelling account of what brought us to this perilous moment in history and a credible vision of a more promising future.

The supply of fossil fuels that has put an end to scarcity in much of the Western world and continues to drive the dizzying economic growth of China and India, McKibben argues, is "a one-time gift." And rather than continue to gorge, we ought to be investing our surplus in figuring out how to live on less. The good news is that while we have already made our planet sick, we are beginning to notice when we have consumed enough: when more no longer makes us happier. Here and there we have begun to scale back our economies, to try to get more of what we need from our neighbors, both because we want to do less damage and because we enjoy it.

McKibben takes up the cause championed by the economist E.F. Schumacher in his classic book "Small Is Beautiful" and by the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry (to whom the book is dedicated) and gives it fresh urgency and a human face. He chronicles a year spent eating exclusively from the valley around Lake Champlain in Vermont, where he works as a writer in residence at Middlebury College -- mainly to prove to himself that it can be done without suffering too great a deprivation. He visits with local farmers, politicians and brewers, but also makes trips to factories and sprawling cities in China and a tiny refusenik village in Bangladesh to see how the oil-mad global economy and its alternatives are playing out in the developing world.

"Somewhere there's a sweet spot," McKibben writes, "that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time, here and around the world."

McKibben spoke with Salon from his home in Vermont about the blind spots of economists, the marginal utility of a teddy bear, and where not to be when the climate crisis gets into full swing.

What does a deep economy look like?

It's more a trajectory than a utopian vision. It tends to draw in its supply lines instead of extend them. It produces using more people instead of fewer. It's an economy that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material; that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability at least as important as increases in size.

How would the idea best be condensed into a bumper sticker?

My friend Todd Murphy, who started the Farmers Diner in Barre, Vt., printed up stickers that said, "Think globally. Act Neighborly." I think that that's very close to what we need. We're talking about rebuilding economies on the kind of scales that people are actually comfortable with. If we could make it happen, I think it would appeal to everyone except for the 2 or 3 percent who are getting unbelievably rich off of the system that we have now.

How is that not a centralized command economy?

It's the opposite. We are lucky, in having survived the 20th century, to have a good list of things that don't work. No. 1 on the list is a centralized command economy. Markets work very well, but as global warming illustrates, they don't solve every problem by themselves. We need to start figuring out how we put real, profound limits on them. I think some of those limits are going to be geographic.

What is your answer to those who would see this as a nostalgic and misguided attempt to turn back the clock?

There are good things from our economic past that we'd do well to try to re-create in the present, but there are also all kinds of possibilities that we're offered by the tools we have now. We can now imagine economies that are local without being suffocatingly parochial. The Web, for instance, allows us to trade recipes, so to speak, instead of trading commodities.

But who are we, as Westerners enjoying the fruits of centuries of market capitalism, to turn around and wag our fingers at people in the developing world?

We have no standing in that court. The Chinese have no more interest in listening to lectures from us on global warming than they have in listening to us sing Dixie. They are paying no attention, and at the moment we don't want them to pay any attention. We're perfect co-dependents in this energy relationship -- we are each the other's best excuse for doing nothing. But the only thing that will make any kind of global deal on climate stick is if we realize that we've spent 100 years creating a surplus by filling the atmosphere with carbon and take some of that surplus, in the form of technology, and transfer it to China, India and the rest of the world so that they don't need to follow our particular path.

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