“I’m going to come close to preaching here,” confessed author and environmental activist Bill McKibben in his keynote address to the 11th annual Caring for Creation Conference on October 25 in Newport Beach, Calif. The conference was sponsored by Orange County Interfaith Coalition for the Environment.

McKibben confessed that as a Methodist Sunday School teacher he doesn’t often get time behind the pulpit, and the conference gave him the opportunity to sound a wake-up call for Christian environmental action.

“Much of what I am going to say is very depressing,” admitted McKibben, “but there is no use pretending that the situation is different or that it is easy to deal with.” McKibben, a journalist by profession, is credited with having written the first book on global warming, The End of Nature, more than twenty years ago. His most recent work, Deep Economy: The wealth of communities & the durable future, addresses what he sees as the shortcomings of the growth economy and suggests a vision of more local and more sustainable communities.

McKibben has been following the global warming story from its initial hypothesis as a theory, to the strong scientific consensus that came in the mid 1990s, to what now has become a strong sense of alarm. “The change is coming much more quickly than we had understood,” he explained to the gathering of about 250 people at St. Mark Church, certified as a “green church” by Audubon International. “We underestimated how finely balanced this planet was.”

The global warming problem is more than a scientific phenomenon, according to McKibben. It is a moral one. And beyond a general moral focus, it reflects the Christian concept of being a good neighbor.

“I was recently in Bangladesh,” said McKibben. It is a beautiful and lush, though crowded, country, with 140 million people in a land mass the size of Wisconsin. Because the land is so fertile, those 140 million people feed themselves each year. They do have problems, of course, one of which is an increase in dengue fever, which happens to be transmitted by a mosquito particularly sensitive to increasing temperatures, and thrives in the warming world.

McKibben ended up with the disease and saw its effects firsthand. “It ended up giving me the opportunity to make a visit to the Central Hospital in a city of 14 million people,” he continued. The wards and the cots were full with those suffering from dengue fever. “I remember thinking, in the midst of my chills, looking around at all these people they are not responsible for this problem,” McKibben recalls.

Who is responsible?

When the United Nations tries to measure carbon emissions, explains McKibben, Bangladesh doesn’t even register, the number is so low. “The 4% of us in this country who produce 25% of the world’s CO2 are responsible,” he challenged. “That means that we are doing the precise opposite of loving our neighbors. We are killing our neighbors. We are drowning and impoverishing and striking our neighbors with disease.”

As Americans and followers of Jesus Christ, layers of responsibility emerge, McKibben argues.

Most Americans are unable and unwilling to rein in our lifestyles in any way that would significantly improve the environment, according to McKibben. And as Christians, our sense of creation stewardship should inform, challenge, and change this unwillingness. “Nothing that we do in mission or in foreign aid will come close to off-setting the damage that we are doing by changing the basic physical stability of the climate on which people depend for their daily bread,” he suggested. “This is a perfectly good definition of what constitutes blasphemy, and we are blasphemers in this world,” he challenged those gathered.

The trip to Bangladesh and this realization changed McKibben.

“I’ve spent 20 years writing and talking and others have too, and obviously these efforts are not working,” he confessed. “We have a 20-year, bi-partisan effort in Washington to do nothing, and it has been entirely successful,” he said.

What McKibben realized is that there was the superstructure of a movement — scientists, engineers, and others who were studying the problem, “but we lacked the movement part of the movement!” McKibben, a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, got together with six undergraduate students to organize an event in April 2007. Through e-mails and spreading the word, that event wound up turning into 1,400 demonstrations in all 50 states. People in Manhattan lined up, wearing blue shirts, to demonstrate where the raising water line will soon be. Folks in Key West, Fla., demonstrated underwater in scuba gear along the coral reefs. School children in Park City, Utah, lay in the snow to spell out the day’s motto, “Step it Up.”

“We often think that we have to convince those last remaining people who don’t believe this is an issue before we can do anything,” said McKibben, noting that even George W. Bush has now admitted that climate change is a real problem. “But what we really need to do is to convince all those folks who already agree there is a problem to do something about it. It is important for us as people of faith to realize the value of symbolic witness,” McKibben emphasized, “and it seems to me that it becomes our moral duty to do just that.”

While he denied being a theologian, the environmental writer asked a question especially targeting people of faith: One of the overwhelming themes of the New Testament is this: love your neighbor. What does that mean in our time? 

Erin Dunigan is a freelance writer/photographer living in Newport Beach, Calif.

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