Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast. I'm
John, Father John Deere, and today I'm speaking
with my friend Bill McKibben, the legendary environmental
activist, author, and founder of 350 .org and
thirdact .org. This podcast is a project of www
.beatitudescenter .org, where you can find many
other podcasts and regular Zoom programs on the
nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence
and working for a more just, more nonviolent,
more sustainable world. So I'd like to begin
with a little prayer. So I invite everyone who's
listening just to take a deep breath wherever
you are. And to relax and recenter yourself and
enter into the presence of the God of peace who
loves you infinitely and personally. Let's welcome
the nonviolent Jesus here with us and ask for
whatever graces we need to follow the nonviolent
Jesus on the path of peace, love, and justice.
God of peace, thank you for all the blessings
of life, love, and peace that you give us. Be
with us as we reflect on the climate crisis and
fossil fuels and systemic injustice and what
we can do to resist this mess we're in. Bless
us, inspire us, strengthen us, and send us out
to do your will and follow the nonviolent Jesus
that we might do our bit to help end the destruction
of Mother Earth and the creatures. and war itself,
and poverty, racism, greed, and all injustice,
that we might be your holy beatitude people,
your holy peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.
So here's a quote from my friend, Congressman
Jamie Raskin, who says about my guests, if we
survive the interlocking plagues of climate change,
right -wing authoritarianism, and savage inequality,
Future generations will utter the name of the
New England moral visionary and activist Bill
McKibben with the same reverence we speak of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Garrison. And it's a real
pleasure to welcome my friend Bill McKibben today.
Bill is one of the world's leading environmental
activists, a bestselling author, founder of 350
.org, which is a global grassroots climate campaign,
which has organized protests on every continent,
including Antarctica, for climate action. He
played a leading role in launching the opposition
to big oil pipeline projects like the Keystone
XL and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which
has become the biggest anti -corporate campaign
in history, with endowments worth more than $40
trillion stepping back from oil, gas, and coal.
He is founder of ThirdAct .org, which organizes
people over the age of 60 to get involved and
take action on climate justice. His 1989 book,
The End of Nature, is regarded as the first book
for a general audience about climate change and
was published in 24 languages. He's gone on to
write 20 other great books, and his work appears
regularly in all kinds of places, including The
New Yorker and Rolling Stone. He serves as the
Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental
Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary
degrees from 20 colleges and universities, and
was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, the Alternative
Nobel in the Swedish Parliament. If you want
to learn more about Bill, see BillMcKibben .com.
So Bill, a very big warm welcome to you. I'm
so glad to be with you. And thank you so much
for joining me on this podcast. And let me say
right at the start, a big thank you for all your
great visionary leadership, your voice, your
organizing, and your lifelong holy work from
Mother Earth. So you're welcome, Bill. Well,
it's very, very good to be with you, Father John,
and get to say thanks for all your... remarkable
work. I've learned a lot from your books and
from your examples. So what a pleasure to get
to talk today. Great. Thanks, Bill. So here we
are, several months into the second Trump administration,
and they're quickly dismantling every good policy
and law to protect creation and humanity from
the worst of climate change and actively, seems
to me, serving the fossil fuel industry as well
as coal and logging and destroying the forest
and getting as rich off climate change as possible.
Not to mention, of course, Bill, the authoritarianism,
oligarchy, fascism. I'm going to continue here.
I have a list. White supremacy, corporate greed,
and I think service to war, basically. And meanwhile,
we continue to see almost daily worse and worse
climate disasters. So I've told you this, Bill.
I sort of don't know where to begin. So I'm just
going to give the floor to you and say, what's
your take on what's happening? politically and
environmentally? Well, I mean, that's a big and
very difficult question. Let's begin with the
deep background. I mean, the most important thing
that's happening on our planet is it's rapid,
rapid heating. We've understood climate change
for about 40 years now. That's about how long
since Jim Hansen. uh testified before congress
that there was this thing we then called the
greenhouse effect and that was the year i started
writing about it um we knew then what the story
was we knew then that we would if we wanted to
prevent the destruction of the planet's climate
system we would need to stop burning coal and
gas and oil um and so far that's proved to high
uh bar for us. We've kept burning coal and gas
and oil, more and more of it all the time. And
now the planet is doing precisely what the scientists
told us it would do, overheat with disastrous
consequences that I won't... bother to list at
any great detail. You know, everybody gets to
watch all these things now in real time, whether
it's the burning of Los Angeles or the inundation
of the Appalachians or, you know, on and on and
on. This is connected to the rest of this trouble
too, though, because one of the things that's
brought us to the authoritarian past we're now
in is the resistance of the fossil fuel industry
towards any attempts to mess with their business
model. You'll recall a year ago when Donald Trump
was running for president, he told big oil executives
that if they gave him a billion dollars, he'd
do anything they wanted. They gave him half a
billion dollars, more or less. And he is doing
everything that they ever wanted. And we see
the same kind of thing playing out in other parts
of the world. Coal and gas and oil seem to almost
inevitably breed a kind of despotism, whether
it's in Saudi Arabia or in Vladimir Putin's Russia
or wherever it is. And so I looked at it in the
most positive way, which I will try to do for
a little while. we're at the point where there's
a new world struggling to be born. The cheapest
energy in the world now comes from pointing a
sheet of glass at the sun. And that's a great
and remarkable gift. The same star that already
provides us with light and heat. And photosynthesis
is willing to provide us with all the power we
could ever use. But that great, great gift, that
great, great gift is a threat to extraordinarily
powerful people and interests. And that's one
of the reasons, not the only one, that we're
now enduring this almost unbelievable siege of,
well, something that looks very much like fascism.
I've been alive a long time, John. I organize
other old people like me at Third Act, which
is for people over the age of 60 who care about
climate and democracy. And we have a long, because
of who we are, we have a long history. The prevailing,
the thing I hear most from my colleagues all
across the country, and there's about 100 ,000
of us now, is that this is just completely unlike
any other moment in the history of our lives.
We've had bad presidents before that I didn't
like, but we've never had anything that even
resembles what we're enduring at the moment.
Yeah. Over the decades, Bill, you've led us not
only in truth -telling and reporting on fossil
fuels and the need for conversion to alternative
sources of renewable energy, but also in organizing.
And in organizing bottom -up people power movements,
which I – this is what I want to ask you about.
Most significantly, 350 .org. And I remember
well being in the People's Climate March, which
was the largest protest in U .S. history at New
York. led by you and 350 .org it was i looked
it up bill september 21 20 2014 we had 425 000
people that day bill yeah it was such a great
day it was a great day i'd love to reminisce
with you about it but let me move on i think
now this is getting to my question which is about
movements so just Take me with a big grain of
salt or see what you think. I think the only
response now to this mythic global crisis which
we have created, which no one has ever experienced
before, the best thing we can do, ideally, is
all do our part in building a global grassroots,
bottom -up, people -power movement of bold, active
nonviolence way beyond Gandhi and Dr. King, the
likes of which the world has never seen. That
literally we need... billions of people actively,
nonviolently resisting all these forms of injustice.
So I want to ask you to speak about the need
and the importance of participating in marches
and protests and getting with the movement, kind
of no matter what. Howard Zinn used to say to
me that in the end, movements become contagious.
That's how nonviolence works. And it works when
people are going to keep at it, whether they're
going to live to see the victory or not. And
that's the catch, so that we don't give in to
despair or depression. So tell us about that,
or reflect with me on that. Sure. You know, I
think that the two great inventions of the 20th
century were the solar panel. and the nonviolent
social movement. I think that they're both remarkable
pieces of technology that we're only now sort
of learning how to really make use of. Obviously,
there were antecedents to the 20th century experience
with nonviolence, and you've written about the
gospel antecedents of those with great power.
But Gandhi, Dr. King, and a million other people
whose names we don't know taught us a new way
of doing politics. And it's extremely important
and extremely rich and in -depth in ways that
sometimes people lose track of. So one of the
things I'm thinking a lot about now is the fact
that Gandhi spent As much of his time working
on local economies and local handwork, really,
as he did on standing up to British imperialism.
The spinning wheel was his great symbol, you
know. And when I try to think about what that.
equivalent is for our time, I think that it's
the rapid deployment of the solar panel, of renewable
energy in all its forms around the world, partly
because it's necessary to keep us from overheating
the planet, but also partly because it's deeply
liberating. One of our two most important commodities
after food, water is energy. And at the moment,
it comes from a relative handful of people in
control of a small number of concentrated deposits
of fossil fuel, all of whom abuse the wealth
and power that that provides them. But it doesn't
need to be that way anymore. We now live on a
planet when, thanks to the God -given wit of
our science and scientists and engineers, the
cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet
of glass at the sun. And think how liberating
that is because there's sun and wind available
everywhere on this planet. It's impossible to
hoard it. You can't hold it in reserve, although
batteries now allow us to make use of it when
the sun drops or the wind goes down. It's available
to everyone everywhere. Hardly worth fighting
a war over, you know. That possibility is remarkable.
So some of the organizing that we're doing now
is all about that. We've just announced plans
for a big weekend of action on September 20th,
21st of this year that we're going to call Sun
Day. And the whole point of Sunday will be to
drive home the notion that this is no longer
alternative energy, that this is now what we
all should be using. It's not the whole foods
of energy anymore, John. It's the Costco of energy.
It's cheap. It's available in bulk. It's on the
shelf. It's ready to go. And if we embrace that,
then the possibilities of a different world.
begin to emerge. I've been thinking a lot about
this because I've been writing a book about the
sun, even as we've been planning this Sunday
thing. And of course, one of the things that
I've been meditating on is St. Francis's wonderful
canticle of the sun. And it was the opening words
of that canticle, Laudato Si, that Francis's
namesake, now occupying the throne of St. Peter,
used as the title for his remarkable encyclical
on climate change and really on a critique of
modernity, probably the most significant document
yet this millennium. So I think these are extraordinarily
deep questions and waters that we're moving into.
We're not talking about... techno fixes. We're
talking about the possibility of very different
worlds. Wow, that's so beautiful and hopeful.
Where can people find out about September 20th,
Sunday, the National Day of Action? Seriously.
Yes, two places. One is sunday .earth, and you'll
really catch the vibe. This is going to be a
day of great beauty, we hope. Is that a website?
Yes, sunday .earth. Web thing where you can have
.earth, not .edu. Yep, sunday .earth. And the
other place, you know, you can also just keep
track of this stuff at thirdact .org. Even if
you're not 60 yet, we don't really check IDs.
You can stop by and see how it's going. That's
great. There's lots and lots of groups that are
contributing to this organizing for September.
Wonderful. And I can't wait to be a part of it
and want to help out if I can. Yes, indeed. So
I want to ask you about Third Act. You know,
it was so heartening, you know, years ago when
all of a sudden this young teenager, Greta Thunberg,
stands up and starts speaking out so eloquently.
Martin Luther King and inspires millions of young
people around the world to go on strike to stop
climate change. And then you launch a movement
for older people over 60, like me. They're related
in lots of ways. Yeah, tell me all about thirdact
.org. Fred is one of my favorite people in the
world. Me too. And I love organizing with her,
and she's just a remarkable human being. And
the movement that she— kicked off there with
young people has been crucially important. The
only problem with it was that I heard too many
people my age saying, oh, it's up to the next
generation to solve these problems, which is
immoral, but also highly impractical in that
when we deal with climate change, John, we're
dealing with a timed test. we don't have very
long to deal with it. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change tells us we need to cut emissions
in half by 2030 to have some hope of staying
on our Paris pathway. That doesn't provide time
for the Gretas of the world to grow up and become
presidents and CEOs and whatever. They're going
to need some backup. And where should that...
backup come from? Well, as I thought about that,
more and more the prospect of people my age as
a potent force began to enter my mind. In this
country, there are 70 million of us over the
age of 60. We punch above our weight politically
because we all vote, and there's no known way
to stop old people from voting. And we ended
up with most of the resources. And not everybody's
rich by any means, but something like 70 % of
the country's financial assets belong to those
people. And so that should give us, if we were
able to organize it, some real power. And that's
what we've started doing. Third Act now has working
groups in pretty much every state. We have working
groups composed of also... what people did in
their lives. There's a third act lawyers group
and a third act educators and a third act faith
group that's mostly retired ministers and rabbis
and imams. And so it's been very beautiful and
very powerful. People said it wouldn't work because
the common feeling is that people become more
conservative as they age. I don't know if that
was true at one point, but if you think about
it, people in their third act now, people in
their 70s, 80s now, their first act was spent
in that period of remarkable cultural... political,
social upheaval and liberation in the 1960s and
1970s. That's very much in our muscle memory,
our generational DNA, the moment when we started
taking women seriously in public life, the apex
of the civil rights movement, the first Earth
Day with 20 million people in the streets. And
half the people in Third Act were very active
in all of that. And half of them have never done
anything like it in their lives, but now find
the time to do it. And also the motivation, because
they do not want to leave behind a world worse
than the one that they inherited. And that's
what we're perhaps unique among generations about
to do if we don't get our act together. Well,
that's great. Thank you for doing it. So we encourage
everyone, go to thirdact .org, and it's a fabulous
website, and sign up and join up. On another
angle about this bill, a few years just before
the pandemic, Jane Fonda got it in her head to
start this vigil in front of the White House,
and she asked you, and you said to her, thank
God, Bill. Well, why don't you get arrested every
week? And that launched the Fire Drill Fridays
movement at the U .S. Capitol. And every week
there were hundreds getting arrested. And I went
out and got arrested in one of those protests.
And I've been arrested a lot, Bill. I thought
it was maybe the most brilliantly organized campaign
I've ever been part of in my life. I was so excited
because you and I both say that we do need, and
this is again Howard Zinn, he said in all the
history of movements, you always do need a kind
of a frontline group of people who are essential
to a transformation, who are willing to go deep
into nonviolence and cross the line and break
bad laws which legalize injustice. And in this
case... climate injustice. So can you just say
a little bit about the importance of nonviolent
civil disobedience on behalf of resisting climate
injustice and that if people are trained and
can do it, they ought to consider it? Yeah. Look,
I think that, you know, we build movements and
I worry sometimes. that people decide that civil
disobedience is the most important part of that
work because it might be the most glamorous or
visible or something. 98 % of the work isn't
that. It's the much more mundane but crucial
work of lobbying, of writing letters to the editor,
of passing petitions, on and on and on. have
to happen. There are moments, though, when we
need to underline the moral urgency of things.
And that's a moment when civil disobedience can
come in handy. I don't think it's a tool we should
use all the time because I think, like all tools,
it gets dull, literally and figuratively, with
overuse. But I do think it's a good thing to
have in your toolkit. And I think that one of
the things that's really powerful about it at
the moment is, and this only works if people
can maintain real and quite strict sense of nonviolence
and peace, is that it's a kind of counter to
the crazy anger. That's just seems to be free
floating now in our political culture. So it's,
you know, we're still learning as we go along.
This is at best 100 years old that we've really
anybody's been trying any of this. And we learn
more all the time about what works and what doesn't
in different settings. But there are moments
when it's really important. Thank you for that
thoughtful answer. I want to ask you about Standing
Rock. I remember running into you there. And
when I, on a day's notice, went out for the National
Clergy Day. And this was part of the movement
by the peoples there in North Dakota against
the Keystone XL pipeline. And I wrote about it
in my book, as you know, They Will Inherit the
Earth. Well, just like a week before we're recording
this. The courts with Trump ruled against Greenpeace
and Standing Rock on behalf of the Keystone XL
pipeline. And I guess we're waiting for appeal.
So could you share your reflections on Standing
Rock and the Greenpeace trial? Sure. So the CODA
access pipeline, yes. Look, the Greenpeace ruling
is a sad miscarriage of justice. But it's also
a reminder of... just how out of touch these
energy companies and things are. You know, Greenpeace
was helpful in that work, as were other groups,
but this was coming straight from the heart of
Indian country. I mean, this was just remarkable
organization by the tribes and lots and lots
of tribes. There were hundreds of different Indian
nations there. uh for that in ways that really
hadn't happened on this continent i think in
a couple of centuries um and so that was one
of the things that made it so relentlessly powerful
but of course it was also a reminder that we
have to work on all kinds of fronts um you know
while we were out there at standing rock is when
uh donald trump won his first election and If
he hadn't won that election, I think we could
have convinced Hillary Clinton to shut that pipeline
down. So it's a reminder that you've got to work
in many different ways in order to get done the
things that need doing. Thank you. I'm so glad
you said that because when I was reading about
Greenpeace, I was thinking so much about the
great time I had there. And I didn't see Greenpeace
there at all. But I met thousands of Native folk
and young people because they asked me to speak
to the crowd. And whereas Greenpeace was, you
know, really behind Jane Fonda and the Fire Drill
Fridays. It's like they picked the wrong movement.
Although maybe they, of course, know what they're
doing. But I like your answer. We keep going
forward and doing what we can. Okay. Let me ask
you a couple more. I want to ask you about. the
spiritual angle or dimension of all of this,
because in the end, it's not just a political
or environmental or social or racial issue, whatever
that means. It's a spiritual issue and a human
issue and a universal issue. It's what I've been
arguing, as you know, Bill, is that, well, Let's
see how I put this. There are spiritual consequences
of climate chaos and destroying the planet. That
might sound a silly way to put it because there's
physical actual consequences in this that's going
to affect the lives and deaths of maybe millions
of people. But what we're saying is we're going
to just destroy everything the creator created,
you know, in the mythic beauty of Genesis. whether
through nuclear weapons or ongoing use of fossil
fuels, and that this has to be front and center,
part of our spiritual lives from now on. And
in that book I did, I was looking at how all
the different faiths are responding to that.
It was just agreement across the board that this
is a central question of any faith and understanding
in the holy or the mystery of God or spirituality.
Can you share where you are with any of those?
Well, you know me. I'm just a—I've never risen
higher in the ecclesial hierarchy than a Methodist
Sunday school teacher. Well, it's still not too
late, Bill. It might be too late for me. But,
you know, I think you're right, obviously. I
mean, I think that, you know, the very first
command we're given in the good book is to take
care of this earth. Really? one we've done the
worst at. And the command that we're given in
the gospels is to love our neighbors. And, you
know, at the moment we're drowning them and sickening
them and making it impossible for them to grow
food and, you know, on and on and on. So all
of that is extremely true. And as I say, I think
that Laudato Si was the best take on all of this
that we've had. The Pope's remarkable encyclical
really is powerful. But I'd add, too, that it's
one of the things that's beautiful about the
prospect of renewable energy. of making energy
from the shining sun and the blowing breeze,
energy from heaven, not from hell, John. You
know, we're able to imagine a very different
world coming at us. That's great, Bill. Thanks.
And I want to ask you a little bit about nonviolence.
As I've read you over the decades and followed
you and heard you speak at various things we've
been at, I found that we're both students of
Gandhi and Dr. King. And as you know, Gandhi
said Jesus was the greatest person of nonviolence
who ever lived and that the only people who don't
know that he's nonviolent are Christians. I hate
laughing at it, but he was a funny guy. I'm convinced
that an authentic Christian life in such a world
of total violence, now on the verge of nuclear
war but catastrophic climate change destroying
ourselves, is a return to the nonviolence of
Jesus, as Gandhi and King insisted. And I've
been moved that you always talk of nonviolence.
And so where – what do you – What are your thoughts
these days about nonviolence, Christian nonviolence
and its place in daily life and also in our work
as activists? You know, I love and revere Gandhi
and Dr. King. The person that I keep thinking
about. In some ways, my greatest hero of all,
Ghaffar Abdul Khan. Oh, wow. The frontier Gandhi,
they called him. Doing his work in an almost
impossible situation in what we now call sort
of Afghanistan along the Pakistani border. And
Gandhi said he was the one person that really
ever understood nonviolence. He raised up a nonviolent
army of hundreds of thousands of people who were
able to, in many ways, shame the British out
of that part of the world. And then he had to
do the same thing against the Pakistanis when
they took over. He's a reminder to me that this
crosses all denominations, that Muslims are every
bit as much leaders in this. work as anyone else.
But it's also, I think, a good lesson for the
very, very difficult moment in which we find
ourselves now. This feels like an extremely dark
time when extremely dark forces, many, many of
them cloaked in the mantle of something they
call Christianity, are are undercutting so much
that we hold dear about our history, our nation,
our possibilities. And so I think it's really
important to understand that people have been
in very difficult places before and that through
courage and good humor and good spirit, they've
managed to build. things that brought us forward.
And I hope that we're capable of doing that.
Again, I'm not convinced that we'll be able to
because the challenges that we're up against
are in some ways time limited. If we don't solve
the climate crisis very soon, then we will not
solve it. But, you know, as long as I've got
strength to do it, I'll keep doing what I can.
And I know you will too. And I know lots of other
people will. The only thing I'd say is, Don't
try to do it by yourself. You know, the American
default is always towards a kind of individualism.
But the most important thing an individual can
do at this point is to be a little less of an
individual and join together with others in building
the movements big enough to make change. That's
why we start things like Third Act. Wow, that's
so beautiful. And it was actually what I was
going to ask you next. A great friend of ours
on the West Coast just died. Lifelong activist,
David Hartzog. I don't know if you ever met him.
He started... A hundred movements. I mean, you
probably were part of many of them. He met when
he was 15 with John Kennedy about nuclear weapons
and five other Quakers. And it had a huge impact
on his friends of Dr. King. And he was organizing
and getting arrested until just two months ago
at 85. His whole life message was just that,
Bill. I never sat around just stewing and getting
angry and feeling depressed and helpless. I immediately
found a few friends. Five is all you need or
ten. And let's do something locally or in our
state or in the country. And many of those took
off like you. Can you say more about that? Because
you've really gone to town with this. You know,
it's like on a recent podcast I had Shane Claiborne
on, I was trying to say, how do we help people
become organizers or realize they have more power
or that even just a small handful of friends
can make a difference? I think that's the lesson
from Jesus to Abdul Ghaffar Khan. But it's more
than that, too. It gets you out of your depression
and your despair. That's why Dan Bergen said
to me as a kid, Bill, if you want to be hopeful,
you have to do hopeful things. Yeah. Well, this
is a good place to end. I'll just say, you know,
I started life as a writer and I still am a writer.
That's my craft. But at a certain point, I realized
that just providing more data and information
and things was, you know, we could win the argument.
To win the fight, we were going to have to take
on money and power. And that's why we also have
to organize. We have to win the argument and
the fight. And happily, we have this tool. to
do that. You know, nonviolent organizing is a
way that the small and the many can take on the
mighty and the few. And we're very lucky to live
in a moment when you don't have to form an army
to go, you know, kill people to make change.
You have to instead build a movement that can
sway both hearts and minds and in the process
change. power. And we'll see if we can do that.
There are good signs right now around the country
of people standing up to the tyranny that we're
experiencing from D .C., but it's obviously going
to be a very hard fight. And so we keep our humor.
We keep our love for each other. We keep our
eyes fixed on the future. And on we go. Wow,
that's beautiful. Well, that's a great note to
end on. And will you come back someday and talk
with me about Sunday, your new book? Absolutely.
Absolutely. I'll look forward to it. Thank you,
Bill. You take care, friend. Thank you, Bill.
And God bless you. God bless you. Take care.
Bye -bye. Thank you, friends, for listening to
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See you next time. Bye. Thank you.