Step It Up

By Bill McKibben, Grist.org. Posted February 6, 2007.

Bill McKibben, an AlterNet guest columnist, is spearheading the Step It Up 2007 campaign. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, McKibben's newest book is the forthcoming Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. His column is reprinted by permission from Grist. For more environmental news and humor sign up for Grist's free email service.

The most important question about global warming right now is: what do I do once I've changed the damned light bulbs?

And one small answer is StepItUp2007.

This is the first of 12 dispatches I'll write, one a week through mid-April, that will chronicle the first nationwide do-it-yourself mass protest, and by far the biggest demonstration yet against global warming.

If all goes well -- and by "all going well," I mean "if you help" -- then on Saturday, April 14, we'll kick off the approach to Earth Day with hundreds upon hundreds of simultaneous rallies all across America, designed to start pressuring Congress to take decisive action on climate change.

Americans will gather in iconic places across the country. Some will be familiar at a glance: the top of the Grand Teton, underwater off Hawaii's coral reefs, on the levees above the Ninth Ward, along a blue line on Canal Street in Manhattan that marks the city's possible new beachfront. Others will be less famous: the steps of your church, the picnic grove in your city park, the biggest barn in your county. But everywhere people will be saying, loud and clear, that it's finally time for serious action from Washington, D.C., on the mightiest problem the world has ever faced.

All you need to take part is a crowd -- small in small places, bigger in big places -- and a digital camera. By nightfall we'll have a cascade of images for everyone, including local and national media, to look at. We'll have proof that Americans care deeply enough to act. It should be lovely in every sense of the word.

We're not an organization. There are seven of us: six recent college graduates earning the sum of $100 a week for their labors, and me, earning only the chance to exorcise some of the ghosts that have been haunting me since I wrote The End of Nature in 1989.

For almost two decades, the few of us working on climate change felt like we were trapped in a bad dream, unable to get anyone else to see the monster looming behind them. In the last couple of years, that's begun to change. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Gore, public opinion has turned. Polling shows people know there's a problem, that they want action. And we have the scientists to tell us exactly what's wrong, the engineers and the economists to offer useful solutions. There have been dozens of good books in the last two years, and fine documentaries. Every Rotary Club in America has seen An Inconvenient Truth.

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Bill McKibben is the author of "The End of Nature" and "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age."

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