Bill McKibben - No More Mister Nice Guy - Grist

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I'm by nature a conflict avoider too -- if you're thinking of cutting in line at the supermarket, you couldn't ask for an easier mark than me. But twice last week I acted in ways entirely out of character. I signed a letter criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his New York Times op-ed opposing the big Cape Wind project. And I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. I wouldn't have enjoyed being on the receiving end of either one (though a lifetime of book writing does tend to inure you to bad reviews).

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: that the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

Do I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a bad environmentalist? No, I think he's a great environmentalist. I've heard him convert 400 Republicans at one fell swoop in the auditorium of my Adirondack high-school gym. Hell, by helping establish the Hudson Riverkeeper, the guy added a whole new class of words to our vocabulary -- now there are baykeepers and airkeepers and summitkeepers. He's sued and written and organized with passion and prowess. But his op-ed on Cape Wind, with its (risible) fear that the windmills might be heard ashore, showed that he hadn't quite understood just how critical the need to get the U.S. off fossil fuels really is. In the face of that need, even possible damage to the livelihoods of commercial fishers is distinctly secondary. If someone were proposing to erect a giant blender in Nantucket Sound so yachtsmen could obtain frozen margaritas more conveniently, then Bobby would be right to object, and the rest of us would go along with him. Instead, they're talking about the nation's first big offshore wind complex, one that would in effect allow residents of Cape Cod to use electricity nine months of the year without emitting a single carbon atom.


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http://grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/01/12/mckibben/index.html