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A Conversation with Bill McKibben

By Susan Ives

In 1989, Bill McKibben sparked an international debate when he detailed the onset of the greenhouse effect in his bestselling book The End of Nature. What was considered seven years ago to be theory is now broadly accepted as science--that human activity is changing the climate, irrevocably changing all life on the planet.

McKibben, now thirty-five, is concerned that, faced with the enormity of environmental problems, people will further sever their connection to the natural world. "Five hundred people died in Chicago in this summer's heat wave--yet people seem more concerned with getting the best deal on an air conditioner than with doing something about global warming," he wrote in 1995.

His most recent book, Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, is McKibben's attempt to make us see both the real danger and the real possibility for solutions to environmental crises. Bill's travel and research for this book have shown him that nature can recover if we let it. And that the land can sustain us--economically, biologically, and spiritually--"if we make wise, sensible, sensitive decisions about how we live on it." The land McKibben lives on is in the midst of the Adirondack Park in upstate New York. He spoke to Land and People editor Susan Ives from there.

Q: The Adirondack Park is one of the few parks in the United States that has full-time human residents who aren't park employees. What's special about living there?

A: I came here more than ten years ago, almost by accident, not realizing that it was so very wild and beautiful, or that it was also one of the most exciting and illuminating places in the world for a conservationist to live.

The Adirondacks are bigger than Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite national parks combined. Half of the land, three million acres, is in public hands, and under the New York state constitution it's forever wild. You can't log it, dam it, or mine it. This protection far exceeds what you get in a national forest--we are very lucky in that regard. The other three million acres are privately owned, and so we have an interesting experiment in letting people and nature make their ways in more or less the same place. Public and private are very much intertwined, and that results in our having to make fascinating, difficult decisions.

This part-wild, part-human condition is one of the things I really like about living here. Because half the park will never be developed, we can deal creatively with the other half. While some of our battles are about setting aside additional areas, we are primarily trying to figure out how to live sustainably on the land that isn't preserved.

Q: You've written that the recovery of the Northeast forests is the great environmental story of the United States and a model of hope for the rest of the world. What makes you see it this way?

A: Most of New England was deforested within one hundred years of the arrival of the Europeans. Then, about 150 years ago, people began moving west, and with Indiana on-line, the attraction of growing corn in Vermont dwindled rather suddenly. When people took their agricultural dreams to the Midwest, the forest began to grow back. With the exception of the Adirondacks, where legislative action was taken to protect the forests, it was just an accident of economics.

So we don't have the original forests, but most of the creatures that should be here are filtering back in. A wolf was shot in Maine two years ago—the first wolf in probably a century to be howling in the woods of northern New England. State game officials in Vermont have confirmed mountain lion sightings. Beaver are back, creating new wetlands everywhere. Turkey, bear, moose, you name it. It's a real testament to the fact that the natural world wants to push back up through our overlay. There's a ghost map of the world waiting to reassert itself.

You can read too much into it, of course. As I said, it wasn't some virtue on our part that allowed this restoration to take place. The resurrected forest is in jeopardy from renewed logging, overdevelopment, acid rain, and global warming. But even when all that's taken into account, I think it's still the best example on Earth of an ecosystem that hit bottom and has begun to recover. And with any luck, just as the devastation that began here spread across the country, just as the suburbs that were invented here have spread around the world, maybe ecological restoration--both accidental and intentional--will spread as well.

Q: You've also written that the establishment of The Adirondack Park in the 1890s was the realization of one of our country's finest conservationist visions. Do you see similar visions emerging today?

A: Yes, and I think they are being informed by the knowledge that we need to go beyond protecting small pockets of wildness--rare orchids or whatever--to protecting entire ecosystems. That the natural world is more than a collection of individual artifacts is the profound recognition of ecologists in this century. A lot of this thinking is being put into practice by various individuals and by organizations like the Trust for Public Land, who understand that in this age of increasing extinction, we are part of the natural systems and we desperately need to protect land for biological, recreational, spiritual, and economic reasons. The latter is very important here in the Adirondacks. In an area dependent on tourism, open space and scenic beauty are important economic assets that we'd be sunk without.

Q: Can you expand a little on how open space can benefit a community or a region economically?

A: Sure. One of the most dramatic examples is in the Pacific Northwest, where a very interesting paradox has been unfolding. The timber industry there has shrunk in the last few years, partly because of environmental regulations but more because the forests were so overcut. People predicted that we were going to see a severe economic recession there.

But, in fact, the region is healthy, one of the fastest-growing parts of the country. Local economists recently issued a report that helped explain the phenomenon. The great advantage of the Pacific Northwest is that it has a relatively natural environment, which provides a quality of life that attracts small companies, retired people, and others who make a place boom economically. People want to live there. Now the problem is going to be managing for growth, to make sure that what drew people there in the first place is not destroyed.

There's no question at all that in the long run our open space will provide the same kind of catalyst here in the Adirondacks. Just look at a map of the East: you see plenty of roads and cities but there aren't any other places with the huge, intact wilderness like we have here. That's our comparative advantage--that's what we're banking on for our future.

Q: One of TPL's priorities is to protect land around fast-growing cities, to provide parks and open space and access to a natural environment for people in urban areas. I know you spent some time in Brazil and were impressed with the conservation projects you saw in Curitiba.

A: Curitiba is a fascinating place. Despite the fact that the population has grown 500 percent in the last twenty years, the green space per inhabitant has almost quadrupled. They did that in a number of clever ways; for example, instead of channeling the rivers for flood control, they purchased land along the rivers leading into the city. They built small dams and created lakes, and around the lakes they constructed large parks. In the spring the lakes rise somewhat and there's a little less park, but it's a very effective means of flood control. And the parks are an amazing economic asset, raising property values in the surrounding area enough to pay for the work. We need to do more of that kind of creative thinking in this country.

Q: Do you think it's possible to rebuild our cities in balance with nature?

A: I'm not sure that the job of cities is to be completely in balance, if by that we mean self-sufficient. They will never be self-sufficient agriculturally, for example. But cities are enormously important in that they are very efficient ways for people to live. If cities are well organized, they take a lot of pressure off the rest of the landscape.

Certainly it's possible to rebuild cities so that they are more in balance with the world around them than they are now and, more important, far more in balance with the souls of their inhabitants. Cities currently stand as a great assertion of the primacy of people above all else. That needs to be countered by places that provide us with the occasion to see ourselves as part of something much larger. Parks and open spaces and community gardens are perfect ways to do that.

Q: In your most recent book, Hope, Human and Wild, you give several examples of things that are going in the right direction environmentally. Do you think that these represent a trend or are they more of an exception?

A: An exception, I'm sorry to say. In the areas of global warming, overpopulation, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and species extinction, for example, we're going in precisely the wrong direction.

However, I think the exceptions are very important because sometime in the next few years, the political landscape is going to shift. I don't know when, exactly, but I'm confident that it will. We're going to endure one crisis after another and we will finally be convinced that we have to start looking at the world from a different perspective, that we have to see the world through an ecological lens as opposed to an economic one. And when that shift in consciousness happens, we need to have as many people as possible thinking about and working on these issues, showing us what can be done; we need networks, organizations, institutions, and models.

Q: Are there any models that come to mind?

A: I'm interested in places that have taken different paths. One that I write about in Hope, Human and Wild is a state in India called Kerala, where people earn an average of $300 per year, about one-seventieth of the U.S. average. Yet people there have the same life expectancy that we have, their literacy and infant mortality rates are similar to ours, and their birth rate is lower and falling faster. It's a place that's a proven exception to the accepted rule that more is better and that human dignity can be achieved only through continued economic growth.

Q: In your first book, The End of Nature, you suggest that our personal relationship with nature has been changed forever. I'm haunted by your comment that people won't be willing to befriend nature for the same reason they don't make friends with someone who's terminally ill. What do you think now about what you wrote then?

A: I think that alienation remains a real danger. Unfortunately, nothing I wrote in The End of Nature has changed; in fact, things that were scientifically controversial, like global warming, have become scientifically accepted in the intervening seven years. All the problems I talked about in that book are going to play out in our lifetimes. We're going to see maximum population growth, maximum CO2 loading, maximum ozone depletion. During the next few decades it's going to be very, very tough--but crucial--to maintain a deep love for the natural world, and to nurture it and keep it as intact as possible. In the foreseeable future we're going to have more losses than victories, but each small victory is extremely important because it establishes a presence and a model to build on. All the difficult physical and psychological work we do now is our charge, our task for the next fifty years.

Q: The End of Nature left me pretty sad, so it was kind of a relief to read Hope, Human and Wild. I'm wondering if you chose to write the second book because you personally wanted or needed something more positive to focus on.

A: Yes, that's very perceptive. I've had a daughter in the time since. I also wanted to convince myself that the solutions to our problems are not paper utopias or environmentalist pipe dreams, but rather that they are real and possible to accomplish. Once you've proven--and I've proven it to my satisfaction--then despair becomes illegitimate, for despair is permissible only when there's no hope left.

For the moment, though the task is daunting and the way is far from clear, I'm convinced that we can live much less heavily on the planet. We not only can, we have to. It's our responsibility.

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Land & People, 1996
Susan Ives is Vice President and Director of Public Affairs at the Trust for Public Land.