Bill McKibben and I have been on parallel but very different journeys related to human-driven global warming since the greenhouse effect first became front-page news back in the late 1980s (examples here and here). (Our video chat above was done in December for my Pace University blogging class.)
Years ago, McKibben shifted from writing to advocacy and movement building with the creation of 350.0rg. With his peripatetic campus-focused campaign for divestment in stocks of fossil fuel companies and the fight to pressure President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline, McKibben has given new meaning to the word overdrive. Indeed,?as I wrote in 2010, ?his ?approach to environmental campaigning seems drawn from the ?year of living strenuously??he endured training to reach peak performance as a long-distance skier.?
Now,?Matthew Nisbet, a communications researcher at American University who has focused of late on climate campaigns?(generating no shortage of sparks), takes a long deep look at McKibben?s career in ?Nature?s Prophet: Bill?McKibben?as Journalist, Public Intellectual and Activist,? a paper published by Harvard University?s?Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, where Nisbet recently completed a residency.
The piece examines McKibben?s strategy and tactics in the context of other ?knowledge journalists? with different approaches, including the Times columnist Tom Friedman and me. I encourage you to dig in and weigh in.
American University has posted?a portrait of Nisbet?s project?and a video statement:
There?s a lot of value in this short statement, including this framing explaining why global warming has been challenging for all kinds of communicators to address:
Unlike conventional environmental problems like acid rain or the ozone hole, climate change is not conventionally solvable. It?s more a problem like poverty or public health ? something that we?re going to do better or worse at. We?re never going to end, we?re never going to solve it.
Of course, there still was a ?war on poverty? and ?war on cancer.?
Campaigns are still part of how we work as a species and society.
But on climate and energy, as on poverty and health, campaigns are just one tool. It?s inevitable that there will be variegated reasoned paths toward the common objective of a sustainable human relationship with the planet.
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