Bill McKibben says we're stuffed

You mention your visit to China. It's seems obvious that the pace of growth happening in China and India right now simply can't go on forever. Why do seemingly intelligent people such as Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs, both of whom you mention in the book, not seem to get it?

It's fairly easy to fool yourself when it comes to environmental problems. The kind we've dealt with so far tend to yield an increase in the standard of living. If your problem is too much carbon monoxide coming out of tailpipes, you need to be able to afford catalytic converters, and the richer you get the cleaner your air is going to get. But carbon dioxide is different. There's no catalytic converter for it, and the more tailpipes you have, the more of it you release. That's the situation we find ourselves in with global warming and it's essentially the same situation we find ourselves with resource scarcity issues such as peak oil. The world harvest of fish is down year after year. The world harvest of grain has plateaued. And just try to imagine a world where people in China own automobiles at the same rate as Americans. It's literally not possible.

You use the term "sweet spot" a couple of times to describe the happy medium between freedom of markets and individuals and the demands of ecological and cultural health. How do you know when you are in the sweet spot?

It's always going to be an ongoing calibration, but we are constantly making similar ones. Since I live in a college town, the great example for me has to do with beer. You watch a freshman come in and discover that three bottles of beer make him very happy and then spend a year figuring out that 13 bottles of beer make him less happy. That's not an exercise we've figured out how to do as a society. Having a little privacy and having enough stuff made us happier, but we haven't yet cottoned to the fact that doubling the size of the house and moving 50 miles out to the next suburb in fact isn't yielding any increase in satisfaction.

You also write about the way in which the Christian religion, at least in America, has been co-opted by this vision of market capitalism. Is that something that you see changing?

I do. In the last year there has been a sudden engagement of religious communities, including evangelical ones, in environmental politics, particularly in the fight over climate change. It reminds us of the potentially subversive role that they might play, since they draw their inspiration from a gospel that, if taken seriously, would blow the minds of most Americans. Organized Christianity had largely succumbed to the hyper-individualist view of the world, which is ironic for a religion whose central tenet is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. We'd gotten away from that, but there's potential for getting back toward it.

A lot of the business models you use as examples in the book are ones that turn a profit but don't grow at the rate that Wall Street demands. Do you consider publicly traded companies and the stock market compatible with a deep economy?

I think we need to figure out, probably through changes in tax policy, how to reduce the demand for 24 percent returns on everything. In a sane regulatory scheme, you wouldn't be able to put 300,000-square-foot stores in every county in America and destroy the local businesses. Hence there would be nobody offering Wal-Mart-size returns on investments. One of the ironies of all this is that Adam Smith imagined capitalism as encapsulated in quite local communities, where it makes a lot of sense. It works pretty well when you have a local bank and local bankers who know the local people and when businessmen are careful to guard their reputation so that the bank will continue to loan them money and so on. It was a virtuous circle for quite a while until it reached gargantuan proportions.

What about what we're doing now? I contacted you through a P.R. person for Henry Holt, who is hoping to sell as many copies of your book as possible. Salon, in turn, is hoping to generate traffic based on your reputation as a writer, which would help drive ad sales and so on. Are we in the sweet spot?

One of the great problems always with trying to change anything about the world is that you are operating in the existing one. I have hypocrisies that run much deeper than that. I've spent much of my life flying and driving around the world to tell people to use less carbon. My great hope is that when St. Peter finishes his accounting I will have ended up two or three gallons to the good -- that I will have persuaded just enough people to change their habits a little bit that it will make up for what I've burned. I piously buy my offsets and all, but I'm under no illusion that there's not a great deal of hypocrisy involved.

I'm not trying to point out hypocrisies so much as figure out just how different the world would be.

I think it's hard to know until we get there. In the book, I write about the music industry, for instance, and the possibility that maybe we'd move away from a world where we have a few mega-stars known to everyone who make a gazillion dollars and instead have lots of semi-stars in any general region of the world who make a good living. One of the beautiful things about the Web is that it allows us to have our cake and eat it too in this regard.

What do you say to someone who says, "I'll tell you when I've had enough. If I want another car, that should be my right."

All I'm saying is this is a democracy. I don't have much patience for the argument that no one should tell me what to do ever. In a democracy we work on figuring out what kind of society we want to build. And if you want to make the argument that we'd be better off with all of us buying whatever car we want until the end of time, then you're going to have to deal with those of us who are pointing out some of the drawbacks.

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