McKibben's ecologism sticks with system

Memphis, Tenn.--The growing awareness of the crisis posed by global warming was reflected here in recent events such as special screenings of Al Gore's movie AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and a lecture by environmentalist Bill McKibben, author of THE END OF NATURE. Over 200 came to the lecture, which began with a description of some of the latest scientific findings showing that the catastrophic effects of climate change are likely worse than thought and can deepen abruptly, and the time to act is short.

Both the lecture and the movie evoked alarm, which environmentalists are trying to turn into organizing, including a growing student movement around climate change that McKibben promoted. At the same time, we are faced with how puny undertakings like the Kyoto Protocol are compared to how huge the problem is. Already in 1995 McKibben had pointed out that technological and legal changes are not enough. Nothing less than a change in "civilization's basic momentum" would suffice.

But his conception of the needed fundamental change in social relations was so limited that he ended up posing the basic problem as an ideology of "hyper-individualism," and the solution as building community, for which he saw local economy as crucial, such as farmers' markets vs. supermarkets. Left untouched in McKibben's vision, as well as in Gore's proposal for taxing carbon emissions, is the capitalist nature of this society. How can civilization's momentum be sufficiently altered without touching capitalism's basic momentum of ever-increasing production for production's sake?

Activists generally agree that Gore's movie is a great way to get the word out. For this movement to be able to attack global warming on a global scale, we need to challenge the ideology implicit in both Gore's and Mcibben's work--not "hyper-individualism," but "there is no alternative to capitalism."

--Franklin Dmitryev