Bill McKibben, Doctor of Humane Letters

Bill McKibben received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Grinnell College Commencement 2015 and gave the commencement address.

About Bill McKibben

A renowned environmentalist and writer, McKibben is one of the nation’s most outspoken activists on global warming. He has written extensively about climate change, alternative energy, and genetic engineering. His book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book about climate change written for a general audience. His more recent works address social movements, consumerism, and shortcomings of the growth economy.

A native of Lexington, Massachusetts, McKibben completed his undergraduate degree at Harvard, where he served as president of The Harvard Crimson newspaper. After graduating, McKibben was a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. McKibben is currently a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Doctor of Humane Letters

For nearly 30 years, author and environmentalist Bill McKibben has urged us to pay attention to — and protect — the natural world around us.

After graduating from Harvard in 1982, McKibben got a job as a writer for The New Yorker. While working for the magazine, he wrote a series of articles that later became the basis for The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general audience.

He followed it up with The Age of Missing Information, which examined the ways that television’s seductive pull could never compete with the natural world just outside our doors. His works are serious, but they are leavened with optimism. In Hope, Human and Wild, McKibben explores communities in the United States, Brazil, and India that have found ways to live more lightly on the earth and rebuild wilderness. McKibben’s other works have tackled ambitious topics: He has argued that we must consider having smaller families, and that we should build community-scale economies, rather than global ones. He is a frequent contributor to publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Outside.

In addition to his writing, McKibben has helped lead numerous environmental efforts. In 2006 and 2007, he led Step it Up, a nationwide environmental campaign to cut carbon emissions and prevent new coal-fired power plants from being built. He is the lead environmentalist fighting against the Keystone XL pipeline project. And in 2014, he helped organize the People’s Climate March in New York, which some reports indicated attracted 400,000 people. It was the largest climate march in history.

His tireless advocacy and persuasive, passionate writing have been recognized by many prestigious organizations. He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing. For his incisive critiques of the destructive paths of a society — and for his tireless work to prevent and solve these problems, we are pleased to recognize Bill McKibben.

Transcript

What a pleasure to be here on this glorious day. It's always good to see the shining faces of the parents and grandparents and the slightly haggard faces of the graduating class who have apparently decided it was necessary to spend on last night in the library hard at work. It's always fun for a commencement speaker to relish the temporary but immense power that has been granted to him after eighteen or so years of education for you all. The last obstacle you face is me. I suppose if I went on speaking forever ... Well, I won't.

None of you can remember the first speech you heard in kindergarten, but likely it had something to do with the theme of playing nicely together. In a way, that's my message today with the emphasis on together.

This is a day for individual pride, yes, but it's also one of the last days in your life when you are by necessity, not by choice, part of something larger than yourselves. I can't hope to know you all as individuals; no one can, but I have some sense of you as a group. I've spent a lot of time at small liberal arts colleges like this one, which are the unique glory of American education and of which Grinnell is such an exemplar. I've spent some time here, too, over the years. The way that a child draws their first picture of a house with four windows and a chimney, that's their kind of platonic ideal of a house, my platonic ideal of a college is the image of Grinnell because my aunt and uncle were the classics department here, or a large part of it, for almost forty years.

I can remember so well watching them as we would come to visit. They were my idea of what professors were like, and they were great scholars. The family joke was that if my Uncle Bill was late coming home for dinner, Tim or Andy would be dispatched to the library to go find him. There he would be standing someplace in the stacks looking for yet another book. Above all, they were members of a community, of the college community. They took it with great seriousness. I can remember the nights watching students cram into their house for readings and study.

Grinnell is a great place precisely because it is a community. In fact, that's the remarkable thing about college. It's the four years in an average American life when you get to live as most human beings have lived for most of human history. That is, in close physical and emotional proximity to lots of other people. It's rare in our society except for college. Sometimes during those four years, it's a pain when someone is playing the stereo at three in the morning or whatever it is, but most of the time it is the great joy when the old grads like me totter back for reunion and talk about college as the best four years of their life. Not really, and I'm sorry to say this faculty, wishing that they could take introduction to sociology once more; they are remembering what it felt like to be in that community. One of the great ironies of higher education is that we spend that four years preparing you to earn enough money that you never have to live that way again.

You can be as creative as you want to be, and I hope that you will because you emerge into a world of serious problems that can only be solved by joint action. One hesitates on a joyful day to talk about problems, but in a sense this is the day that any last training wheels come off, and it's at a moment when we desperately need you as full-fledged citizens, so a certain kind of frankness is required. There are always troubles in the world, but there are two in particular that the generations before you are not only not solving, but making daily worse and that will affect and shade your lives unless you are able to work to change them.

The first is what we've come to understand now as the radical inequality in this country and in this world. This year, watching events in places like Ferguson we got some strong sense that the American experience is not the same at all for everyone, but that's not just anecdotal. It's backed up by every kind of statistic you could ask for, and the numbers are painfully stark. Yesterday's newspaper carried the story that the six heirs to the Walmart fortune together have more money than 47.3% of the entire U.S. population combined. The bottom half of America has less assets than those six people. Yesterday's paper also carried the news that the 25 most highly paid hedge fund advisors in the country make more money, those 25 people, than every single kindergarten teacher in America combined, all 158,000. That gives you some sense of where our priorities at the moment are lying.

A few of those people are redeemed by their generosity, though on average rich people are less charitable than poor. Even so, this is not healthy for the society in which we live. Of course, if you look at this globally all of us hold roughly the same position to much of the rest of the world as those Walmart heirs hold towards us. You're now equipped, all of you, to try and join that top tier if you want to. In fact, most of you will end up if not in the stratosphere then in one or two orbits down. The question is how you will react. By closing in? By choosing the gated community? Or by reaching out?

The second crisis that we face illustrates why the stakes are even higher than with gilded ages in the past, why reaching out will be so important. The second crisis is the physical one. Climate change is the overwhelming reality of our time. College commencements go back to the 11th century, but until the last few springs all of those college commencements took place in what scientists call the Holocene. That period of benign climactic stability that coincided, and not coincidentally, with the rise of human civilization. Not yours. In you lifetimes, the most important thing that has happened is that this planet crossed over some invisible boundary from the Holocene into something else, maybe what scientists now call the Anthropocene the world made by man.

How is the Anthropocene going? Not very well. Last week came news from NASA that the Larson B ice shelf, slightly larger that Rhode Island, is poised to tip into the ocean in the Antarctic. You've seen the pictures in the last few months from California enduring a drought unlike any that has been recorded in the past. Of course, as usual these things are bad where we are, but we have enough money for the moment to cope with them. In the rest of the world, they're an unmitigated disaster. What Desmond Tutu, the great Nobel laureate and freedom fighter, called the greatest human rights challenge of our time.

The thing that makes this so tragic is that it is no longer necessary. The best thing that has happened in your four years in college is that the price of a solar panel has fallen about 75%. The engineers have done their job and made it possible for us to imagine a world that runs in a very different way. We can do this; Denmark, yesterday, generated 115% of the power that it used from the sun and the wind and shipped the extra off to the rest of Scandinavia. It is possible to do this, as we can tell, Denmark has no monopoly on wind.

At the moment, it's not happening, this transition, fast enough to matter. It's not happening because of that same pervasive inequality. The fossil fuel industry is the richest enterprise that human beings have ever conceived. Those riches have been used to keep us from making that transition with speed.

The richest man on Earth is actually the two Koch brothers for instance. Oil and gas barons whose net worth taken together out-shadows anybody else. They have announced that they will spend $900 million on the next presidential election. A lot of it will be spent here in Iowa. They will spend it to make sure that nothing changes. They'll spend more money than the Republican Committee or the Democratic National Committee on the next election.

It is hopeless to try to outspend the Exxons and the Shells of the world, so the answer has to be citizenship: aggressive, engaged, occasionally impolite citizenship. You are all well-trained now to do something useful from nine to five, or from nine to six or seven probably in your first job. I'm not worried about that. It's your evenings and your weekends that we need some of, the time when we do the work of citizenship. Once in a while, that means voting or electioneering, but usually it means figuring out how to come together to apply pressure on our systems the other 364 days of the year, because these are not individual problems.

It is a good idea to change your light bulb, I have solar panels all over the roof of my house, and I drove the first electric-hybrid car in my state, but I do not try to fool myself that we are solving climate change in those ways. This is a structural and systemic problem, which means that the answers are structural and systemic.

I am reminded often of a friend of mine, a guy named Gus Speth, who had perhaps the most golden resume that had ever been. He had founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, then he went to work as chair of the President's Council on Environmental Equality, then he headed the United Nations Development Program, the he was dean at Yale. I got to spend the most time I ever spent with him, about 48 hours, in central cell block in D.C. where the two of us had been arrested at the first protests against the Keystone Pipeline. At a point in the course of that 48 hours, Gus, by then in his 70's, looked over at me from the next cell through the bars and said 'you know, I've held a lot of important positions here in Washington, but none of them seem as important as the one I'm in right now.'

This doesn't mean that all of you need to go to jail. Nor does it mean that those older among us are exempt from the challenge. In fact, though young people are leading most of these fights, it probably isn't the greatest single thing for your resume to have an arrest record right away. For the rest of us, once you're past a certain age what the hell are they going to do to you? Something, by the way, goes triple for anyone who happens to have tenure.

You don't all need to go to jail, but you do need to be citizens of all kinds of communities. Including very shortly, alumni. Citizens of this Grinnell community, where you have been in residence but will now be in the diaspora but still connected and still connected to your college. We are very hopeful that Grinnell will come to join this divestment movement from fossil fuels that has marked Stanford and Syracuse, and last week the University of Washington, and so many other places. It's beautiful to see as the Rockefeller family, the first family of fossil fuel, said last September that the most important step that they could take was to sell off their families' investments in coal, gas, and oil in an effort to weaken the political power of that industry.

You also need to be citizens of the country and of the planet. You are at a great moment for which to do that. The sudden advent of the internet seems obvious to you, but to all the rest of us it seems still like something very new and unusual. The sudden advent allows you to imagine connection in a visceral way that people before you have not been able to. Don't think that you can change the world by sending each other e-mail petitions. You can't, but you can take that beautiful connection and use it to go to work in the real world. All of it only works if you are part of something larger than yourself. Faced with the kind of crises that we face, the most important thing that an individual can do is to not always be an individual, to join together with others.

Here's the paradox. In my experience, that joining together with others leads to the most deep and hopeful pleasures that you will find. There was a story in the paper last week about a survey of lawyers around the country, and what they found was that those who were happiest were the ones who were making the least money: the ones who were working in some kind of public service law. It's all relative of course; they're lawyers, so they're not starving. Everybody is doing fine, but the ones who were devoted to something else were finding deep satisfaction.

Your task is not to be poor. Your task is to think about where riches lie, and to see if perhaps the answer isn't that they lie with others. All of us who are old now, we are all so grateful for the work, intelligence, good humor, and spirit that has brought you to this point. We up here, behind you, and among the ranks of your parent and grandparents, what we know ,if we know anything is that all of us are in this together. We are overjoyed that that us is today so magnificently enlarged.

Congratulations.