Graduates, students, parents, and members of the community gathered on the chapel lawn to hear Bill McKibben, a renowned Global Warming activist, author, and United Methodist. His book The End of Nature, published in 1989, was one of the first books on Global Warming for the general public.
Claremont is one of the United Methodist Church’s 13 official seminaries and receives close to $1 million annually from the church. It is regarded as one of the denomination’s most liberal official schools for clergy training.
“There is enormous work to be done,” McKibben said, “because God’s creation is at risk and with it the lives and hopes of billions of people around the world.” He explained that the maximum sustainable amount of carbon in the atmosphere is 350 parts-per-million, and that earth’s atmosphere is now at 393. “Of all the signs of the times, of all the writing on the wall, this is probably the most important.”
For McKibben, climate change “is not an abstract future problem, but a present crisis; the greatest present crisis.” While it is a great practical crisis, it is also a moral one. “The four percent of us that live in this country are responsible for a third of the global warming gases in the atmosphere because of the heights at which we live.” According to McKibben, the way of life to which Americans are so accustomed is inflicting suffering and calamity on the less fortunate around the globe.
“We will have to confront the fact that this is a fight,” McKibben declared, “and that the adversary in it, the powers and principalities that are in very short order taking our planet and turning it upside down is the fossil fuel industry…And against them we’ll need to muster our courage and our witness.” McKibben explained that this effort to cleanse the earth is not radical. “We’re the opposite of radicals in many deep ways,” he insisted. “We’re conservatives trying very hard to hold on to the world something like the one we were born into.”
A few years ago, McKibben founded a non-profit organization, 350.org, and has organized demonstrations and rallies all over the world. Despite his success in increasing awareness, he conceded: “It would be possible, maybe even logical to say that the odds against change are too much, that we’re not going to make the change we need in the time we need, because so far we haven’t shown much sign.” But he continued, “And yet there are hopes…One of the communities that are beginning to rise to this challenge is the community of faith. And we need them to rise to this challenge because potentially they remain the only real subversive communities in our societies – the only places that can imagine some goal other than accumulation for human existence.” It is this materialist philosophy, McKibben explained, that is responsible for the imminent doom of life as we know it.
“The moment has come to set aside our differences, to focus on that which cannot help but unite us,” McKibben implored. “That unity is important, but it’s insufficient also, because we will need…to do it in ways that are uncomfortable for us as people.”
To give his audience a picture of just how important this fight is, McKibben concluded: “And so it is important to understand that our call as people of faith is one that stretches back over millennia, but it also stretches forward over millennia. And we just happen to be at one of those rare hinge points in human history where our actions over the next short while will determine what those millennia to come are like. And, in retrospect, determine in a sense how wise the millennia that led up to them were, how well-prepared we were for the kind of test we now face.”
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