Bill McKibben says we're stuffed

It's been almost 20 years since you warned of global warming in "The End of Nature." But it was just a couple of months ago that President Bush finally brought himself to utter the words "climate change." Do you feel at all frustrated and angry?

There is some of that. Unfortunately, the science on global warming has grown steadily worse and the situation is much grimmer now than it was 20 years ago. But there have been changes in the last couple of years that have made me hopeful. We're figuring out that the endless increase in our consumption, which drives global warming more than anything else, actually isn't making us very happy. That seems to me a very powerful idea. If it were making us happy, we'd be out of luck, because no matter how much trouble it was causing we'd just keep pushing the lever.

But there's at least a potential for change because the solutions to two of our major dilemmas lie in more or less the same direction. Another reason I'm willing to be hopeful right now is the straightforward one that more people are finally beginning to take these things seriously. I helped launch StepItUp2007.org in early January, hoping that we would be able to organize at least a couple hundred rallies on climate change by April 14. As of early March I think we had 835 scheduled in 49 states.

But is it too late? You've written that even if we do everything right from here on out, we're still going to see serious increases in temperature.

There's no stopping global warming. We've seen some and we're going to see some more. The only question is whether we can keep it from being catastrophic, and it may be too late for that. If we manage to make it through this, it will be by the skin of our teeth and I'm not at all sure that we will. I remember a friend of mine at the Kennedy School during the late '80s saying that global warming may turn out to be the public policy problem from hell because there are so many interests involved. And we happen to be realizing it just at the moment that the Chinese and the Indians and the rest of the world are starting to burn fossil fuel in appreciable quantities.

So why shouldn't I learn to use firearms and stockpile some canned food and head for the highest ground?

I think there's a part of everyone that thinks about that. You hear people make nervous jokes about where to buy real estate. But if you stop to think about it, you start to understand that the communities we need to build in order to slow down global warming are the same kind of communities that are going to be resilient and durable enough to help adapt to that which we can't prevent. In the not very distant future, having neighbors is going to be more important than having belongings. Membership in a community is going to become important once again both psychologically and physically in the way that it's been for most of human history.

But if the change is abrupt, are we going to be able to build those bonds fast enough?

Some places will fare better than others. The suburbs of Atlanta don't seem to me to be a great place to be living right now.

What kind of world do you envision for your daughter?

I hope that the community she lives in will be much stronger than the community I've grown up in, that she'll have closer and more friends, that she'll need her neighbors and they will need her, and that this human community will compensate to some degree for the physical instability that's going to be her lot.

You write about encouraging developments in the field of economics, especially the growing recognition that personal satisfaction tends to level off after a certain point in material gains. But why wait for economists to start to figure these things out when our traditions of literature, philosophy and religion have been teaching them for a long time?

That's a good question. We've been overwhelmed by an economic idea of the world in the last hundred years. As a society we've made every decision based on whether or not it will make the economy grow, so now it's hard for us to resurrect the good sense found in just about every world religion and most great literature that having more stuff is not the path to happiness.

So how did the mantra of economic expansion gain such momentum?

Because it works up to a point. Economists have been extremely good at showing us how to produce more. But they have confused that with an end. They've decided that because they're good at doing it, therefore that's what should be done. The basic idea goes back to Adam Smith, who was prescribing for the human condition in his time, a condition of essential scarcity. We moved away from that a long time ago in the U.S. The marginal utility of another stuffed animal for my daughter, for example, is unbelievably low, but for the girl working in a shower curtain factory in China, whom I describe in the book, who brims over in tears the second she sees it, it's very high. One of the confusions of economics has been that getting a stuffed animal is the same experience for both.

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