I recently picked up a book that’s been sitting in my must-read pile for a long time: David Halberstam’s The Children, a remarkable account of the African-American students who began the momentous lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in February 1960 and went on to risk their lives as Freedom Riders and as movement leaders in Birmingham and Selma. Half a century on, it can be easy to forget that citizens of this country took such risks, and made such sacrifices, in order to gain basic human rights.

Still, I thought I knew the story. So I was startled to find myself pierced, on the very first page, by Halberstam’s description of one young woman’s inner struggle:

Years later, though she could recall almost every physical detail of what it had been like to sit there in that course on English literature, Diane Nash could remember nothing of what Professor Robert Hayden had said. What she remembered instead was her fear. A large clock on the wall had clicked slowly and loudly; each minute which was subtracted put her nearer to harm’s way. … It was always the last class that she attended on the days that she and her colleagues assembled before they went downtown and challenged the age-old segregation laws at the lunch counters in Nashville’s downtown shopping center.

Halberstam then describes Diane Nash’s memory of the night before the first sit-in, on Feb. 13, 1960:

On that evening, she had sat alone in her room at Fisk University. Suddenly she was hit with an overpowering attack of nerves. What had she gotten herself into? she wondered. … She, Diane Nash, a coward of the first order in her own mind, a person absolutely afraid not just of violence but of going to jail, was going to join a small group of black children and ministers and take on the most important and resourceful people in a big, very white, very Southern city….

It was a joke, she thought, it will never happen. We are a bunch of children. We’re nice children, bright and idealistic, but we are children and we are weak.

I think I know why those words pierced me the way they did. Over the past year and a half, I’ve gotten acquainted, and at times worked closely, with a group of student climate activists in the Boston area. And while the situation they face is vastly different on multiple levels — historical, cultural, political, personal — from what students like Diane Nash confronted, I’ve seen them begin to make similar choices, and to take, or be willing to take, similar risks. A number of them have been arrested — some multiple times, and in unpredictable circumstances — for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL pipeline and extreme fossil-fuel extraction. And they are ready to do more.

Then came the news on Friday that John Kerry’s State Department had issued a draft environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline, offering President Obama no reason to reject the project. Reactions from climate hawks were swift and, in some cases, blistering. And with a decision still months away, some (like TIME‘s Mike Grunwald) are suggesting that the Keystone battle — and the larger battle over the Alberta tar sands — is shaping up to be the climate movement’s Selma moment, comparing it to that 1965 hinge point in the civil rights struggle.

This comparison, I’m finding, is one that a lot of the student activists I know are ready to embrace. It’s certainly true that none of them face anything like the racial injustice that the lunch-counter students and Selma marchers suffered. And yet most of them are consciously fighting for what they call climate justice — and, here’s the thing, fighting not only for people in faraway places but, increasingly, for themselves.

These students feel themselves — people of their generation and younger — oppressed by powerful, corrupt forces beyond their control. They grasp the urgency and scale of the climate crisis — and understand the role of the fossil-fuel industry in obstructing any serious efforts to deal with it. They quote the alarming reports from the International Energy Agency and the World Bank. They see the catastrophic trajectory their elders have put the planet on — and the failure of our governments, corporations, and media to address the crisis in any adequate way — and they feel something approaching desperation. They feel forced onto a path of radicalism.

I’ll be honest: This scares me. I worry about my young friends. I’m inspired by their courage and commitment, but I know that most people their age can’t afford an arrest, not in this kind of economy. And I empathize with anyone who feels ambivalence toward radical action, and where it might lead. I think of the lessons of the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the more radical elements of the antiwar movement took an increasingly destructive turn. It’s easy to draw comparisons to the early ’60s and forget where that decade ended up.

And yet I can’t deny these young people their right — and privilege — to act on conscience and to struggle nonviolently, against seemingly immutable forces, for their future (and, yes, my own children’s future). Their analysis of the political situation is painfully accurate: at this late hour (as I argued recently in the Boston Phoenix) to be serious about the climate crisis — and what science demands — is to be radical. Sometimes I wonder if young people like these are the only ones in this country with the guts and maturity to accept what that means.

I sat down in a coffee shop with two of these students, Harvard sophomore Alli Welton and first-year Boston University grad student Ben Thompson, immediately following the Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 17, and I later spoke at length with Brandeis senior Dorian Williams. All three are deeply involved in the campus network Students for a Just and Stable Future (SJSF), the statewide grassroots network 350 Massachusetts (spearheaded by Better Future Project, on whose board I serve as a volunteer), and in the student-led fossil-fuel divestment campaign.

These excerpts from our conversations have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Alli Welton, 20 years old, is a sophomore at Harvard studying government and the history of science and deeply engaged in the Divest Harvard campaign. She grew up, as she puts it, “privileged in a poor rural town,” in eastern Washington, and had “very direct experiences with inequality and poverty.” At 16, while attending an international school in northern Italy on a scholarship, she was invited to tag along with 350.org to the 2009 U.N. climate conference at Copenhagen.

Arriving at Harvard in 2011, Welton dove in with SJSF and got to know a number of older climate activists, some of whom had been arrested at the White House protesting the Keystone XL pipeline that August. She recalls: “My huge respect for those people gave me a distorted idea of civil disobedience for a few months. The arrest record seemed like an exclusive symbol of commitment that I felt I needed to be taken seriously by some of the older activists. By the time I entered sophomore year, though, I had a much better understanding of the strategic value of civil disobedience. I’d taken classes on civil rights history and media strategy.”

On Jan. 7, Welton and seven of her young activist friends, including Ben Thompson and Dorian Williams, walked into the TransCanada office in Westborough, Mass., sat down facing outward in a tight circle, and locked and glued themselves together in protest of Keystone XL and the extraction of tar-sands oil. (The Phoenix‘s Chris Faraone has described the action in colorful detail.) “We stand together as representatives of a desperate generation,” Welton wrote for the group in an online statement. “Today, we hope to present our political leaders with an example of the courage needed to confront the climate crisis by putting our bodies in the way of corporations whose activities threaten our society.”

It wasn’t a hard decision to do the Westborough TransCanada action. We were all pretty good friends, and very comfortable with each other, and we were all in it together.

But then I remember sitting, on Christmas Day, just sitting there thinking about this, and feeling scared, and like, what am I doing, is this even strategic, or right? And then just realizing I couldn’t back out, because I’d made this commitment to my friends, and I don’t know, that’s the most powerful thing in the world. There were definitely moments when I was really scared, as we were practicing and I could sort of visualize how it would be, and how intense it could get, but I also felt like I couldn’t let the fear show, because I felt like, if I looked scared, everyone else would pick that up. And I just felt like, you had to push through that emotion, and not let people realize you had it.

But then, I don’t know, the night before, it was like 3 a.m., and we’d been practicing all day — I was really tired, hadn’t eaten or really drunk anything, and just sitting up awake, I pulled out the Martin Luther King Jr. stuff that I read last year as a freshman, when I took this class on the civil rights movement, and understanding the history of that. And just reading that calmed me down, incredibly.

Then the next day I was 10 times more nervous. But you just have to act like you know what you’re doing. Because I felt like, we’re such a tight-knit group, if some of us start caving in to the fear, or the anxiety, it could just spread and the whole group could crumble. So you have to have people who are strong, and, “OK, we’re going to do it,” and just walk into that office park like nothing’s wrong, like it’s not scary to be dressed up in a coat with chains hidden under your scarf and feel like you’re sneaking in disguise, like some sort of children’s fantasy book. That’s what it felt like — invading the castle. And I just had to pretend like that was normal.

And I think the other thing that scared me, and still scares me, is when I think about that, there is some sort of analogy here to military and invasion. Like, these companies are waging war on us and our lives. And we have to fight back, somehow. And I don’t know, it’s still surreal sometimes to realize that this is the world we live in, where it’s not something from, like, 500 years ago, when there used to be knights and kings and all that sort of drama that you read about in books when you’re a kid. You’re just, like, “Oh, I don’t live in that world, that would never happen to me, nothing that terrible would ever happen.” And then you, like, grow up — and you realize that we have these giant corporate tyrants who are just controlling our lives and, like, sacrificing us — for their profits. And that’s really scary, that we have to fight that. It’s insane that we live in this society. And you only see it clearly when you really sit down and think about it. Then our actions make sense.

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I graduated from high school at 16 and got a scholarship to go study abroad in northern Italy for two years. And I ended up going to Copenhagen in 2009, the U.N. conference, with 350.org, when I was just 16. Being there, and being surrounded by the most committed youth activists in the world, we were doing a lot of organizing and protesting in solidarity with Tuvalu and Kiribati, and the island nations, or like African countries, or South American — the Indigenous Environmental Network was really big there — I saw climate change as this huge human rights abuse against people who are already disadvantaged in our global society. And it became the most important thing in the world to me. I knew theoretically there could be impacts on the U.S. But I thought, I’m from a rich, developed country, my parents are well off, I know I’m going to college, and it’s not going to make a difference to my life.

But especially over this past year, I’ve learned that climate change is a threat to me. One of the seniors, last year, involved with SJSF, she said something like, “You know, I think I could die of climate change. That could be the way I go.” And that stuck with me. And the more I learn about it, and read the incredibly scary reports coming out from the World Bank — saying, like, 4 degrees Celsius by 2100 may be impossible to adapt to — it’s very possible that we could be the generation watching our society crumble away. And, I don’t know, sometimes I walk around Harvard late at night, you know, with all these huge, fancy buildings, and think about what Rome was before it fell. And are we the generation that gets to sit and watch America fall?

And I guess before, I’d always been thinking of climate activism primarily as solidarity, and helping reduce inequality in the world, which is something I’ve cared about ever since I was a kid, growing up privileged in a really poor town. But I guess, recently, it’s become more of a self-preservation thing, in a way.

As youth, we don’t have a voice in this fight. In the sense that, like, there’s no way that I can climb the government ladder and end up in a position of enough political power to save myself now. I’m never going to get that chance. And there are kids who are being born today, or born 10 years ago, they’re not really going to get that chance either, if we don’t start winning in the next couple of years.

And that’s insane. You always learn about marginalized groups in society, and think about how their voices don’t have as much power, and then suddenly you’re like, “Wait, that’s exactly what I am, with climate change.” I’m like the helpless kid here just begging the older generations to save me. And, like, what the hell is that? That’s hard — I don’t like begging.

Ben Thompson, 22 years old, is a first-year PhD student in mathematics at Boston University. He grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, his father a CPA and his mother an elementary school guidance counselor, and then went to Cornell College in Iowa. During his freshman year, deeply affected by accounts of the devastating 2009 wildfires in Australia, he began thinking seriously about nonviolent direct action. “I remember looking up the Iowa legal code trying to figure out what would happen if I sat down in front of a coal plant entrance,” he says. “But I was in Iowa with no support, and it was a big scary step, so I never ended up doing it.”

Thompson was one of the eight who “locked down” in the TransCanada office in Westborough, Mass. “I’m ashamed to say that it took me nearly eight years to tell my dad that I am a climate activist,” he told a crowd of 1,500 at the Northeast tar-sands protest in Portland, Maine, on Jan. 26. “I finally had to tell him, because I had to say that I was going to wrap hardened steel chain around my waist until the police cut it off.”

My road to engagement was very long and gradual. I saw a presentation from a climate scientist my freshman year of high school, and got involved in recycling club and stuff like that. I remember bringing copies of the hockey-stick graph to class, and making speeches about industrial agriculture to the student body. My senior year I took an enviro science class. I remember reading an Orion article on mountaintop removal with some pretty intense personal accounts. I also remember around this time reading a quote from a climate scientist in a new report, that was something to the effect of, “It’s not quite time to chain ourselves to the state house, but we are getting close” — and I remember thinking, “It sounds like it’s time to me.”

And I think that decades from now, people are going to say, “Of course you were going to chain yourself together inside a TransCanada office. Why wouldn’t you?”

But for me, the whole time during the Westborough action, I was thinking, “I can’t believe that I’m the one that’s doing this.” I love rules. And I love following rules. And I’m compulsively helpful. And for the month before, I spent all my free brain time thinking about how I could make it as hard as possible for them to remove us, and how to make it take as long as possible, but as soon as I got into the office, and as soon as there was a person in front of me, I was offering up suggestions, like, “Can I take my belt off? Maybe if I take my belt off you’ll be able to shimmy the chains over my legs.” [laughing] I think a couple times people said, “Uh, I don’t think we need to offer them information when they’re not even asking for it.”

I think people have an idea of the activist, like, “The activists are taking care of it, and I’m not an activist.” And that the activists are born to go and challenge authority. And for some of us, I think that comes naturally, but for a lot of us, it doesn’t. I was very uncomfortable. I mean, I did want to get out. As soon as the lock clicked, I was like, I want this to be over.

But the fear that I felt around the action pales in comparison to the fear I feel around climate change. I’ve spent sleepless nights and had panic attacks at 4 a.m., thinking about, you know, reading reports, and just thinking, like, are we really doing this? Am I really expected to read this and then go do my studies? Like nothing’s happening? This is insane. And so I don’t know if that fear helps extinguish the other fear.

I remember freshman year in college, there were incredible droughts in Australia, and they had wildfires there that were measured not in acres or homes lost, but lives lost. And I remember one story really hit me hard, where there were some people who must not have heeded the call to leave, and then there was a knock at someone’s door, and they opened the door and there was a man there and he was holding a baby, and the skin was sloughing off his body, and he said, “I just lost my home, I just lost my wife, and I lost my daughter, will you please just save my son?” And that really hit me. I was just disgusted that my silence could have led to that, or could lead to that in the future. And that I’m a member of the society that did that, and I continue to benefit from it. And so I think that was a really radicalizing moment for me.

I think our only asset as a movement is that we have everything on the line, and that leads us to be willing to do more. That’s our only asset. I’m willing to risk my life for this. And a lot of people today are willing to do a lot more than people working on other issues. And that’s our only asset — and we have to take advantage of it.

Dorian Williams is a 21-year-old senior at Brandeis University, where she majors in anthropology. She grew up in Chicago, both of her parents college professors. Her freshman or sophomore year at Brandeis, as she was beginning to get involved in climate issues, she remembers a screening of the documentary The Freedom Riders. “I found it really inspiring, and that’s actually been one of those reference points in the back of my mind,” she told me.

Williams has been arrested four times for committing acts of nonviolent resistance. The first was in April 2011 at the Department of the Interior, protesting mountaintop-removal mining and other extreme fossil-fuel extraction, while she was attending the Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C. “Like, 80 people rushed the doors and filled the lobby,” she remembers. “And I was in this huge room surrounded by all this energy, and thinking what am I going to do right now? Am I going to get up and leave, or am I going to stay?” She stayed. “It was a huge identity shift for me. Like, if it’s not me, who is going to do this? The people in West Virginia can’t afford to travel to D.C. and get arrested. You know, I’m white, I come from a privileged background, if people like me aren’t willing to take this risk, then who on earth can afford to take these risks?”

Williams’ next arrest was in front of the White House in August 2011, along with 1,252 others protesting the Keystone pipeline. Her third was in July 2012, on a mountain in West Virginia, where she and others, organized by the RAMPS campaign, locked themselves to a truck at the largest coal mine in the state. She spent 10 days in jail, unable to make $25,000 property-only bail, awaiting her trespassing sentence and $500 fine. Her fourth arrest was at the TransCanada office in Westborough, Mass., on Jan. 7.

The DOI was my first arrest and that was really scary and a huge decision, and then West Virginia was also a really scary, difficult decision, because the stakes were so different.

It was not an easy decision to make, at all. Walking onto a mine site and locking to a piece of machinery was unlike anything I’d ever done before. I mean, it was a level of personal risk, it was a newness. It wasn’t in D.C. It was actually where things can go wrong. It’s where you don’t know how the cops are going to respond, how the miners are going to respond. You are confronting people who have every right to be pissed off at you, you know?

Basically they had people come a couple days early to do training. So we were all on the property of somebody living in West Virginia for a couple days. And then they took us to the largest mine site in West Virginia, Hobet mine, in Lincoln County. During those couple days of training people had self-organized into different affinity groups, and each group decided what risk level they wanted to take, what kind of action they wanted to take, and then they took us all in cars and vans and dropped us off at the mine, and we broke off into our individual groups and just went and did our thing. And we were there for, I don’t know, not too long, before the police showed up.

I was treated fine. Some of the other people I was arrested with were not treated fine. And I saw some of it, not all of it. I mean, the stuff that I saw, I don’t think was the worst that it got. There were two male folks who they basically just, I don’t know — the part that I saw was them taking them into the processing center. And I heard it got a lot worse once they were behind closed doors and no one could see them anymore. Part of it was they were being noncompliant, which means they weren’t walking or standing or helping them out in any way. So the process of pulling them out of the van, and then bringing them into the processing center, was the most violence that I’ve ever personally witnessed. It was really distressing to see. Because they were just really not careful with their heads. They were yanked out of this van that’s like several feet off the ground, so you know, the guy hit his head on the metal van, and then again on the ground. And they dragged him to the processing center, so then his elbows are bleeding and his shirt was torn up and stuff, and they were like trying to get him to stand by twisting his shoulder. And then a bunch of them were trying to pull him through the door and he hit his head really loudly on the door frame. And that was really scary. I thought they’d knocked him unconscious.

So, I’ve been lucky that I’ve never experienced violence, and lucky that I’ve never had to witness it before that point.

I think leading up to that action was even scarier — I mean, there were a couple points that were really new degrees of fear that I have not felt before. The first one was before the action, because I had no idea what was going to happen. That was, for me, the scariest thing. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I mean the night before was terrible. I was desperately trying to find reception to contact my parents and my support people from home, and trying to figure out whether to go through with it. I guess I was less worried about my personal safety at that point and more just, like, I didn’t want to be a burden on my family, and I didn’t know how this was going to affect them.

And eventually it came down to the same thing as at the Department of the Interior, that these risks are not easy for anybody, and if someone who has as much privilege as I do can’t take these risks, then who’s going to stand up for this stuff?

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I think every time you start hitting your boundaries, and West Virginia was a kind of emotional experience and put a lot of strain on my support systems. I’m really hesitant to go back to that kind of place for a while. At least until I’m financially independent and can really take these risks on my own.

I’m absolutely going to keep doing what I’m doing — I want to be supporting and inspiring other people to take that level of action. I’m trying to take the lessons of my experiences to really engage other youth and really help them take action.

But I want to be careful not to glorify those who get arrested. You know, there are so many roles and so many ways to engage, and so many things are so important, and every time I’ve been arrested there’s been twice as many people behind me, allowing me to do that, and those roles are so important, and I just want to make sure that everyone out there who can’t get arrested — because not everyone has that ability — still feels like they have every bit as much influence and ability to be powerful in this movement.

In some ways, the beauty of this whole thing is that because it’s the greatest challenge that we’re facing, it’s also the greatest opportunity to come together and reclaim community, and a global community, and allow people to think beyond themselves. And I think that my generation hasn’t had enough of that. I think that we’re really atomized and separated and segregated from ourselves, and there’s a hole, and an absence. And feeling connected and feeling a part of something — that’s why people are addicted to Facebook, you know? It’s not because they enjoy Facebook, it’s because they know they’re missing something.

And I’ve not felt so connected to the people around me as I have in this movement.

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I think my motivations have really begun to change. I think climate change is not something that anyone wants to take on the burden of understanding, because it’s terrifying. You don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know how it’s going to affect you. You have ideas, people have educated guesses. But it has the potential of being the single most trying thing for our species in thousands of years. And it’s falling on our generation to transition to whatever that’s going to look like, that great unknown, in a matter of, like, our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes.

And I think when I started out in this movement, it was because of the injustices I was seeing. The first time I was arrested it was because of hearing more about the injustice. Going to West Virginia, that was in solidarity with people who — our government is basically allowing a war to take place on them. These companies are blowing up their homes. If another country had done that, that would be an act of war, but they’re companies so they get to do it.

But I think something has really changed for me recently, and just my deeper acknowledgment of what’s at stake, and what’s on the shoulders of my generation. And I don’t feel like I’m fighting purely, anymore, against those injustices. That’s still part of my motivation, but I think it’s gotten a lot more personal for me. I feel like I’m fighting for the right to have children. I know a lot of people who have given up on that.

That’s why I’m really inspired by a lot of the women in this movement. The moment that I give up on my right to have children is the moment that I acknowledge the world is going to be so hideous and horrendous and horrifying that it’s not even worth being alive in. And I can’t do that. So I’m fighting to make this planet literally livable and worth experiencing for my children.

The fear I’ve experienced in my activism has never been greater than the fear that I have of climate change. It’s visceral. It’s very real. And to a degree that, on good days, it makes me fight — it gives me a fighter’s instinct, which is not something that I would naturally have. But on bad days, it makes you want to run away. I know people who want to run away and build isolated farms in the middle of nowhere to try and escape it all. And sometimes it’s paralyzing. I’ve gone through literally bouts of, not depression, but very serious, very low states of being for hours to days to weeks at a time. And it comes and goes, and you kind of have to wade through it, because it’s never going to go away. You just have to work through it so that you can keep fighting.

No doubt like a lot of Grist’s climate-conscious readers, I tend to view humanity’s near-term future as, well, problematic — no, make that downright terrifying. So, when I saw the title of Steven Johnson’s latest book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Then when I saw that the book contains barely a passing mention of climate change, you could say I was a little skeptical of Johnson’s grip on our planetary reality.

Now, I’ve been a fan of Johnson’s for years. I’ve worked with him from time to time as an editor and producer. He’s one of the most admired science and technology writers around, author of books like Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, Everything Bad is Good For You, and Emergence. And despite the new book’s title, he’s not simply another glib techno-utopian. He’s also, rest assured, fully aware of climate change.

But he does, emphatically, still believe in a future marked by progress. And in this book he argues, ambitiously, that the most promising developments driving social progress today can be seen in an emerging wave of thinkers, entrepreneurs, artists, and activists he calls “peer progressives.”

What’s a peer progressive? To begin with, they’re inspired by the decentralized, non-hierarchical, “peer-to-peer” structure of the internet. As Johnson notes, however, “the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the internet itself. For them, the internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn’t the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem.”

Johnson goes on to describe the rise of the peer-progressive worldview, centered on the principles of the leaderless “peer network,” as something approaching a social and political movement. Slowly but surely, he writes,

a growing number of us have started to think that the core principles that governed the design of the Net could be applied to solve different kinds of problems — the problems that confront neighborhoods, artists, drug companies, parents, schools. You can see in all these efforts the emergence of a new political philosophy, as different from the state-centralized solutions of the old Left as it is from the libertarian market religion of the Right. … Increasingly, we are choosing another path, one predicated on the power of networks. Not digital networks, necessarily, but instead the more general sense of the word: webs of human collaboration and exchange.

Johnson points to peer-network success stories like Wikipedia and Kickstarter and New York City’s 311 system, even political protest movements (the relative success of which can be debated) such as MoveOn and the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street.

I find all of this tantalizing. Johnson, I think, is clearly on to something. But there’s just no getting around the glaring, and puzzling, absence of climate change — and the pressure it exerts on any optimistic vision of the future — from his book’s argument. How could one of our best, most zeitgeist-savvy science writers paint a picture of our moment so conspicuously incomplete? And yet, is it possible that the part he gets right — the promise of peer networks — can somehow help us deal with the part he left out?

I had to ask. And Johnson gamely agreed to an email exchange for Grist, which I’ve lightly edited here.

From: Wen Stephenson
To: Steven Johnson

Thanks so much for agreeing to this exchange. I think you know I’m a longtime admirer of your work. But I have to be honest, here at the outset, and say that my initial reaction to this new book — just given the (slightly outrageous) title, and only having read the introduction and perused the table of contents — was, shall we say, uncharitable.

Sorry, bear with me here.

Grist readers and writers think a lot about the future, and, in particular, about what climate change means for our collective future. And it’s safe to say that most of us who’ve spent a lot of time plumbing the climate crisis aren’t nearly as optimistic about our human social prospects as you are. And so, on the face of it, I simply couldn’t understand how a writer as smart and knowledgeable as you are could write a book about progress and the future — much less an optimistic book about progress and the future — without grappling in any sustained way with the greatest and most urgent threat facing all of us, and especially facing today’s children and future generations. My reaction, I hate to admit, fell somewhere between incredulity and, well, contempt. Here was yet another example, I thought, of the #climatesilence pervading our media culture.

Then I actually read the rest of the book.

And, I have to confess, I kinda liked it. In fact, more than kinda.

Of course, it remains the case that the book gives climate change no more than a passing mention. And yet, as though to acknowledge (or apologize for?) the omission, you write near the end: “No doubt there will be places where the [peer progressive] approach turns out to be less effective. It may well be that certain pressing problems — climate change, military defense — require older approaches or institutions.”

So, I have two questions for you, to begin with. First, given that I know you’re aware of, and concerned about, the magnitude of the climate threat, why didn’t you tackle it head on, devote a chapter to it, in this book? And second, perhaps more importantly, why do you suggest that peer networks may be less effective in dealing with the challenge of climate? That sentence feels a bit too much like a throwaway. I’d love to see you unpack it. What is it, exactly, about the peer progressive approach that may make it less effective in dealing with climate? Because, on the contrary, it seems to me that peer networks have huge potential contributions to make to the climate fight — indeed, are already making them. But I’ll save my specific thoughts on the latter for the next round.

From: Steven Johnson
To: Wen Stephenson

It’s great to be back engaged in one of these conversations with you! And I’m glad your feelings of incredulity and contempt lifted once you read the entire book. That would have made for a fairly depressing conversation otherwise.

You make an excellent point about the importance of climate change, and its absence in Future Perfect. But before we get to that, let me back up a little and say a few things about what I was trying to do with this book.

As you note, Future Perfect starts with an extended preface about progress, making the point that we have a deep bias against stories of steady, incremental improvement in our society. If you look at society on the scale of the last 20 or 30 years, most measures of our social health — everything from violence to physical health to drug use to air and water pollution to automobile safety to divorce rates — have improved markedly over that period. Not everything has gotten better, of course, but the story of that progress is far more encouraging than most people suspect. Most of that progress did not come from sudden technological breakthroughs. It came, instead, from the subtle but crucial forms of mass collaboration that shape society: from government regulation, nonprofit interventions, doctors and scientists, local communities, and in some cases, private corporations.

I spent those opening pages walking through that story because I think we live in an age where people are deeply cynical about our ability to solve big problems, where we assume by default that as a society we are on a downward slope. (This is, in fact, one of the few places where the far left and the far right seem to agree, though they disagree about the nature of the problem.) So I think it’s important to remind people that that sense of terminal decline is at least partially an illusion; that there are plenty of cases of progress happening all around us — and if we apply ourselves, and learn from those successes, we can solve other problems.

As you know, the main torso of the book then turns to the argument for a new political worldview, one predicated on the power of peer networks instead of traditional top-down organizations like states or corporations. I talk about the way peer networks have been harnessed to build technology platforms like the internet or Wikipedia; to fund creative projects, a la Kickstarter; to empower local communities, as in the participatory budgeting approach pioneered in Brazil 30 years ago; to make governments more innovative, through the mechanism of prize-backed challenges; to reform the campaign finance system; and even to transform the internal organization of corporations so that they behave more like peer networks.

These are all stories that showcase what I’ve called the “peer progressive” philosophy actually out there in the real world changing society for the better. But it’s by no means a comprehensive list, and more importantly, it’s just the beginning. This is something that I thought about very consciously when I was writing Future Perfect: It’s a book about something that hasn’t fully happened yet; it’s a book about a movement that’s just in its incipient stages. I wrote it to amplify the voices that are already working in this mode, and to inspire more people to use peer networks to solve problems that aren’t mentioned in the book. I’ve written books where I took a long time writing and researching to get a comprehensive view of a mature field or historical event — Where Good Ideas Come From and The Ghost Map were written in that mode — but Future Perfect was designed to be a different kind of book: I wanted it to be short and punchy and to come out now, right in the middle of an election season, right as these various projects were starting to coalesce into something larger.

There’s a cost to that kind of strategy, and the cost is that you don’t end up covering every single element that could be relevant to the argument. Would the book have been better with a chapter on peer network solutions to climate change? Absolutely. Maybe this dialogue will ultimately lead to an additional chapter for the paperback edition, which would be great.

Why did I write that line about climate change potentially requiring “older approaches or institutions”? In truth, I think you’re right when you say it sounds like a throwaway. I wanted to have some acknowledgment that peer networks were not a solution to all our problems, and top-down decision-making would continue to be a part of society even in a world where peer progressivism has become a mainstream philosophy.

There is a more interesting question lurking behind that offhand comment in the book, though, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. One of the advantages that central planning has over decentralized solutions is its capacity for long-term thinking. If you think about it in terms of cities, peer networks are brilliant at identifying immediate problems in neighborhoods, and proposing and sometimes even funding solutions to those problems. But right now, in their current incarnation, they are less adept at thinking about the city’s future on the scale of 20 years or 50. In other words, right now, peer networks are great at fixing potholes or building community gardens or sharing news about the school board election. But they’re not as good at building sea walls, or designing a plan to get a metropolis off of carbon-based energy sources. But as I said, we’re just starting to experiment with these kinds of approaches, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if my concerns about long-term thinking prove too short-sighted. In which case, it will turn out that in writing Future Perfect I wasn’t optimistic enough!

From: Wen Stephenson
To: Steven Johnson

You write: “we live in an age where people are deeply cynical about our ability to solve big problems …”

I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, I think you and I have a common enemy — cynicism. (Something our generation, perhaps, has a particularly hard time getting over.)

And this goes to the heart of why I did, in fact, end up liking the book (quite a lot), once I got past what I felt was an incomplete initial framing. I genuinely admire your stubborn refusal to give in to the culture’s, and especially the media culture’s, pervasive cynicism — and not simply on the basis of some feel-good wishful thinking, but based on the evidence of what’s actually happening in the world around us. So, kudos to you for that.

But I want to tell you where I was last night, because it’s entirely relevant here.

Last night, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein packed Boston’s famous Orpheum Theater (where Bill saw the Ramones, back in the day) for the Boston leg of 350.org’s 21-city “Do the Math” tour. There were something like 3,000 people, including a large number of college students from schools all around the Boston area, totally fired up and ready to take the climate fight to the fossil-fuel industry.

As I’ve become involved in the 350 movement (I helped launch the grassroots network 350 Massachusetts earlier this year), I’ve seen a lot of ground-level organizers at work — and working outside of government and the political party system, outside the big environmental NGOs, outside the mainstream media, and forming what sure looks to me like your idea of peer-progressive networks. Quite honestly, it’s the most inspiring thing I’ve ever been a part of. Hope is no easy thing. But if anything gives me hope these days, it’s the passion and energy and commitment — and swarming, collaborative intelligence! — of the people building the climate movement. We’re going to need a lot more people like them if we’re going to have a fighting chance. But based on what I saw last night, and what I’ve seen over the past couple years, it’s clear that something is really happening here.

And so, with all of this in mind, I want to quote a key passage from the final pages of the book, and then pose another question. You write:

There is a utopian strain to this [peer-progressive] vision, to be sure — utopian in the sense of both unchecked optimism and a certain lack of real-world practicality. Rebuilding the social architecture of the U.S. electoral system, to give one obvious example, may not be an achievable goal in the short or even medium term. But Wilde had it right: “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth consulting.” It may well not be possible to implement peer-progressive values on the scale some of us would like — in our lifetimes, at least. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to imagine what those larger changes would look like, if only to give us something epic and inspiring as a lodestar, guiding our more incremental movements.

Still, the peer network is not some rarefied theory, dreamed up on a commune somewhere, or in a grad school seminar on radical thought. It is a practical, living, evolving reality, one that is already transforming dozens of different sectors. It underlies the dominant communications system of our time, along with some of the most significant social movements.

Wilde did get it right. I love that line. But it’s also crucial to be absolutely clear about the vast and dire challenges we face as a society and a civilization in the face of climate change, even as we work overtime, using every social, technological, and political tool at our disposable, to address it.

I’m very interested in how peer networks may help us build more powerful social, and ultimately political, movements. Despite what some believe, we can’t rely on “sudden technological breakthroughs” to solve the climate crisis for us. It’s going to take some hard-won political breakthroughs — and it seems the only way that will ever happen is through some combination of decentralized, peer-network movement building, on the one hand, and some very smart, very inspired and committed leadership to focus the movement on the specific, urgent tasks involved in transforming our politics and our economy.

You’ve written that the genesis of Future Perfect goes back to your 2001 book, Emergence, and your description in its final pages of the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. You note the way that passage seemed to anticipate something like Occupy Wall Street, or even the Arab Spring. But you also note that those examples are far from, well, utopian. So, what does experience teach us about the promise and limitations of decentralized, “leaderless” peer-progressive movements?

From: Steven Johnson
To: Wen Stephenson

I haven’t spent enough time with 350.org up close as you have, but from a distance it seems like an essential contribution, and a great example of the power of peer networks.

But I think it’s important to stress that this notion of the peer network is not — as people sometimes assume — just a high-tech synonym for grassroots organizing. Bottom-up organizations like Occupy Sandy are certainly peer networks, but the concept is deliberately meant to be larger than that. Think of it as a concept equivalent in scale and variation to something like “the marketplace.”

The basic definition of a market is flexible enough that it can incorporate everything from a shopping mall to the NASDAQ to Etsy to a roadside farm stand. (Words like “government” or “democracy” have a similar flexibility.) A peer network is a way of collaboratively coming up with ideas, sharing and improving those ideas, and deciding which ones should be priorities. Its key values are density, decentralization, and diversity. (It’s important to point out that value of diversity for a peer progressive is slightly different from the traditional multicultural use of the term; diverse groups tend to make better decisions and come up with more innovative solutions to problems, and thus avoid the “echo chamber” effect.) In peer networks, we have lots of people collaborating from multiple perspectives without a small elite of “deciders” to set the course for the overall network. The internet and the Web and Wikipedia were all built with that kind of collaborative architecture, yet I suspect most of us wouldn’t describe those efforts as grassroots organizing.

I bring up this distinction for two reasons, both of which directly relate the problem of climate change. A few weeks ago, I participated in a wonderful panel at MIT’s Media Lab on the whole question of peer progressive politics, with Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig and Susan Crawford. At some point in the discussion, I mentioned my concern about peer networks and their capacity for long-term thinking. The response was very interesting: Yochai, who has been thinking about these issues as deeply as anyone I know, immediately pointed out that we have the whole concept of climate change — as well as exhaustive scientific evidence to prove its existence — thanks almost exclusively to the collaborative peer networks of academic science. In other words, the ability to think on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years — both back into the deep history of the planet’s past, and forward into the near future — did not come to us from the market or from the state. Were it not for the open, decentralized, collaborative architecture of science — thousands of minds working all around the planet, freely building on top of each other’s work — we might well have no idea that climate change was even happening.

(Yochai’s argument should have occurred to me earlier, because I’d written extensively about the importance of academic peer review to the history of peer networks, including quite a bit of material on Enlightenment-era scholarship and the beginnings of Earth Systems science in my book Invention of Air. But of course, that’s the beauty of these kinds of exchanges: sometimes the most important ideas come to us when we let other people riff on top of our own ideas.)

Still, the knowledge of climate change is meaningless unless we can figure out a way to act on that knowledge. The open architecture of science has given us the ability to see the long-term crisis that confronts us — an extraordinary achievement, and one that we should be genuinely optimistic about. Where we have less reason for optimism is our ability to make decisions as a society based on that knowledge. And this is where we turn to my second point about the role of peer networks in society. To be a “peer progressive,” as I’ve defined it in Future Perfect, is not just to champion peer networks in grassroots politics or academic research or software platforms. It also involves applying those values of density, diversity, and decentralization to more traditional institutions wherever possible: to corporations and governments. Some of the most exciting developments in the peer progressive agenda involve these hybrid forms, where a top-down organization like a city government builds a peer network to make it more agile and responsive to the community’s needs, as in New York’s 311 system.

If our current political system seems woefully ill-equipped to deal with the crisis of climate change, I think a great deal of that incompetence comes from the ways the system violates the peer progressive values of density, diversity, and decentralization — through both the preposterous campaign finance system and the gerrymandering of congressional districts. We don’t have space here to get into the details of it, but suffice to say that both these developments greatly reduce the diversity and density of influence on our elected leaders. (Lessig has written about this powerfully in his book Republic, Lost, and indeed we discussed the topic at length at that MIT event.) If we could reform the political process so that billionaires and multinational corporations didn’t have a disproportionate impact on our political leaders, and gerrymandering didn’t push Congress towards extremist candidates, I suspect the prospects for acting on our climate change knowledge would be far more encouraging than they are today.

For a peer progressive, then, the response to climate change is threefold: encourage and celebrate the peer review collaborations that enabled us to understand the problem in the first place; build and amplify grassroots networks like 350.org that will build awareness and implement both legislative and non-legislative solutions; and then reform the political process so that our leaders (and the laws they pass) are influenced and elected by a wider and more diverse network of citizens. Those last two are not easy steps, by a long shot, but I don’t think they are significantly more challenging than the hurdles we overcame as a society over the past 40 years, culminating in last month’s election: gay marriage initiatives, 20 women senators, a reelected African-American president. The problem is, of course, we don’t have 40 years.

From: Wen Stephenson
To: Steven Johnson

You’re right, we don’t have 40 years. To use a sports analogy, the science is telling us that we’re at the buzzer, and it’s all coming down to a deep three-pointer.

So the question now, to my mind, is whether we can speed up the process of movement-building, innovation, and political transformation — do these things faster, perhaps, than they’ve ever been done before. We probably don’t have time to allow a completely organic, self-organizing, leaderless, bottom-up process to come to fruition entirely on its own. We have an emergency on our hands. And emergencies require decisive action — which requires leadership.

I don’t see how we get away — especially when time is of the essence — from the need for leadership, a kind of guiding intelligence and decision-making structure. Not necessarily “top-down” in the old-fashioned sense — it can and should be informed and inspired by a network of “peers” — but leadership nonetheless.

This is why I’m so interested in the notion of these “hybrid” forms. When you say that “a peer network is a way of collaboratively coming up with ideas, sharing and improving those ideas, and deciding which ones should be priorities,” that sounds an awful lot like effective grassroots organizing. And I wonder if something like the 350 movement might be seen as a hybrid peer network — because, yes, there’s a core leadership group, more or less steering things, but the movement’s strength comes from its network of local and regional groups, throughout the country and the world (it’s truly global). Its success, I think, is based on its decentralized, collaborative nature. The anti-Keystone campaign, and the way it has spread and coalesced, bringing together a really diverse network of players — from First Nations people in Canada to Nebraska ranchers to East Texas land owners (and, oh yeah, a few climate activists, too) –  is a case in point. But there’s no doubt it involved leadership.

So, what if part of the network’s collective intelligence includes identifying and empowering leaders — not a single leader, but a sort of leadership core, a peer network-within-the-network?

Here’s another analogy: in the earliest days of the Web, it took the development of an interface, the Mosaic browser, followed by the Netscape browser, to make the Net intelligible and navigable to a great many more people (especially non-techies like me!). This is probably stretching the analogy too far, but in a way, I see something like 350.org — and any number of other grassroots movement-building organizations — serving a similar purpose. What if they’re a kind of emergent interface for a diverse and distributed movement?

From: Steven Johnson
To: Wen Stephenson

I think your software analogy is a great one, actually. If you look at the history of the Web or the history of open source platforms like Linux, there are indeed certain key individuals who have functioned as “leaders”: Tim Berners-Lee or Linus Torvalds, for instance. That leadership historically involved two key roles. They plant the initial seed (or I should probably say kernel, since we are talking software), and then they inspire the broader network that forms around their founding idea. Those are crucial roles, and again, from afar, they seem very similar to the role Bill McKibben has played with 350.org.

But that leadership role also has its limits. It’s not an executive function; it’s not a commander telling the troops what to do. If Steve Ballmer wants something to change in the Windows platform, he can make it happen, because being a corporate CEO gives you that kind of leadership authority. If Torvalds or Berners-Lee want to change something about Linux or the Web, it is literally out of their control. They can cajole and persuade and inspire, but they can’t just issue an edict. That’s the way peer network leaders differ from their equivalents in corporations or governments.

What tends to happen with peer networks is a kind of blurring effect, where the traditional distinction between leader and follower or between producer and consumer gets fuzzier. If you look at services like 311, or the many government-backed challenges  and competitions at challenge.gov, or Beth Noveck’s visionary peer-to-patent system, what you see are situations where people who are not on the government payroll are suddenly allowed to contribute their ideas and judgments to problems that governments are trying to wrestle with. In the older model, there were elected officials and government employees, and then there were ordinary citizens, who “participated” in government by voting every few years and paying their taxes. In the peer network model, those citizens start to take a more active, participatory role, whether it’s reporting potholes or reviewing patent applications. The same blurring is happening with media, where a new middle zone has opened up between the producers and consumers of media. There are still voices in the public conversation that are louder and more influential than others, but it’s much harder to steer the overall conversation than it was 20 years ago.

But let me steer this particular conversation in a slightly different direction at its close. I ended the last post with the idea of three layers of peer networks in the climate change fight: the peer review of academic science; the grassroots networks of 350.org and others; and political reform that would reinstate peer progressive values in the campaign finance system and congressional districting. But during my book tour this fall, a number of people have suggested to me that there’s another layer that we should consider, which is the ultimate vision of what energy use in the 21st century should look like.

We got into this mess by relying on a deeply centralized, hierarchical model of energy production and consumption. As in the old days of mass media, the 1% produce the energy, and the 99% consume it. But all the trends in green energy that I can see suggest that that model is as doomed as the newspaper monopolies ultimately turned out to be.

Micro-renewables are going to blur the distinctions between energy production and consumption in exactly the same way they have blurred the lines between leaders and followers in all these other fields. A world where energy flows between peers in a network (what Jeremy Rifkin calls “lateral power”) would likely be a world where we could live much closer to that carbon target of 350 parts per million. So in the end, it may be that peer networks are not just a vehicle that will help us reach our goal. They might also be the goal itself.

It was game time. The Saturday night crowd on the Vermont campus was festive, boisterous, pumped. People cheered and whooped when told that one of their heroes, climate activist Tim DeChristopher — serving a two-year federal sentence for his civil disobedience opposing new oil and gas drilling in Utah — would soon be back on the field.

When the man on the stage, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, said it was time to march not just on Washington but on the headquarters of fossil fuel companies — “it’s time to march on Dallas” — and asked those to stand who’d be willing to join in the fight, seemingly every person filling the University of Vermont’s cavernous Ira Allen Chapel, some 800 souls, rose to their feet.

McKibben and 350, the folks who brought us the Keystone XL pipeline protests, are now calling for a nationwide divestment campaign aimed at fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. Beginning with student-led campaigns on college campuses, modeled on the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, they’ll pressure institutions to withdraw all investments from big oil and coal and gas. Their larger goal is to ignite a morally charged movement to strip the industry of its legitimacy.

“The fossil fuel industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license — their veneer of respectability,” McKibben tells his audience. “You want to take away our planet and our future? We’re going to take away your money and your good name.”

I was there in Burlington on Saturday to spend some time with the 350.org team, watch their run-throughs, and attend the night’s show, a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the 20-city Do The Math tour, officially launching in Seattle on Nov. 7, the day after the election. The tour builds off of McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which appeared in July and is one of the most widely read pieces in the magazine’s history. Buzz is clearly building, and not just in McKibben’s home state of Vermont. The Seattle show is sold out. The Boston show, on Nov. 15, sold out in less than 24 hours and has moved to a venue three times larger, the Orpheum Theater, with 2,700 seats. (Full disclosure: McKibben sits on Grist’s board of directors.)

Part multimedia lecture — with video appearances by 350.org allies like Naomi Klein, James Hansen, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu — and part organizing rally, with a live musical performance, the Burlington event gave a taste of what’s to come. The tour will “evolve,” with different elements and onstage guests along the way — for example, Klein and filmmaker Josh Fox, of Gasland fame, will join McKibben onstage in various cities. Although it was a little rough around the edges on Saturday night, nobody seemed to mind (McKibben was playing, wisely, to his hometown crowd). The basic structure and central message of the show were well in place — and, just as important for 350′s objectives, the organizing wheels were well in motion.

As 350′s Matt Leonard, serving as “tour manager” for Do The Math, explained it to me, the tour isn’t simply about “getting butts in seats” for a lecture or concert (thus the relatively low emphasis on the musical guests in each city, most of whom are yet to be announced). It’s about getting “the right people” in those seats. “This isn’t just for publicity and outreach,” he says. “We’re putting tremendous effort into making sure students, community leaders, college trustees, and influential decision-makers are a part of this event, because they are the ones that will turn this from a talk into a hard-hitting campaign.”

Sure enough, there in Burlington, students at UVM and other area colleges were already talking up divestment campaigns. Elsewhere in New England, a student-led divestment movement, spearheaded by the network Students for a Just and Stable Future, is off and running — at Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, Amherst, the University of New Hampshire, and a dozen other campuses. Similar campaigns are being discussed on campuses around the country. And on Saturday night, McKibben told the crowd that Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, the first to divest from South Africa in 1977, is the first school in the nation to move toward divestment from fossil fuels.

This is real. And it’s just getting started.

Clearly, McKibben and 350 know their audience for this tour, and it’s not simply the general public. Far from attempting to communicate climate science to the uninformed, or disinformed, in a lowest-common-denominator way, Do the Math is about lighting a fire under the movement, rallying the troops, and mustering forces for a major new offensive — what the Do the Math website bills as “the next phase of the climate movement.”

Before heading up to Burlington, I asked McKibben what that means. “Fighting Keystone,” he told me by email, “we learned we could stand up to the fossil fuel industry. We demonstrated some moxie.” But, he added: “We also figured out that we’re not going to win just fighting one pipeline at a time. We have to keep all those battles going, but we also have to play some offense, go at the heart of the problem.”

The Rolling Stone piece and McKibben’s Do the Math lecture leave no doubt what the heart of the problem is. Drawing on a widely circulated report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of U.K. financial experts and environmentalists, McKibben shows that the fossil fuel industry’s known reserves contain five times the amount of carbon needed to raise the planet’s temperature more than 2 degrees C above preindustrial levels — the point beyond which, according to international consensus, all bets for a livable climate are off.

As McKibben points out, we’ve already burned enough carbon to raise the global thermometer almost 1 degree C, with disastrous effects. At the current rate, we’ll have burned enough additional carbon in the next 16 years to propel us over the 2-degree line this century. To prevent that from happening — to slow the process down and ultimately stop it — the fossil fuel industry would need to commit to keeping 80 percent of its reserves in the ground, forever, and help bring about a rapid shift to clean energy.

Obviously, given the sheer amount of money at stake — many trillions of dollars — the odds of anything like that happening under current political conditions are nil. McKibben is arguing that, if there’s any hope at all of preserving a livable climate, those conditions must change decisively. And they can — but only if and when enough people understand the simple climate math and realize that the fossil fuel industry is prepared to cook humanity off the planet unless somebody stops it.

Far more than money is at stake. At risk, the Do the Math presentation makes clear, are countless human lives. The most affecting display in Burlington was a show of faces of people, all around the world, who are already suffering the impact of climate change — in Kenya, Haiti, Brazil, India, and Pakistan, and many other places, including the United States. Projected on the screen behind McKibben, they’re a powerful reminder of the human face, and cost, of global warming.

Likewise, this tour, and the movement it aims to galvanize, are about far more than math. They’re about justice and injustice, right and wrong — what you could call the moral equation.

The tone of the climate movement is shifting. Maybe it all goes back to 2009 and 2010, and the failure of Copenhagen, the collapse of climate legislation in the Senate, and the disillusioning, infuriating lack of climate leadership by Barack Obama. You could feel it in the air then — a palpable sense that the system itself was hopelessly paralyzed and corrupted, and that politics-as-usual would never be enough to save us. With a kind of desperation, but with history as a guide, people began talking and writing in earnest about building a grassroots movement based on something more, something broader and deeper, than all the lobbying money and the corporate-style, K-Street-friendly communications strategies. A movement built on something more like moral outrage.

McKibben’s tone has changed markedly as well. There were hints of it in those brutal opening chapters of Eaarth, released in the spring of 2010, where he surveyed the planet’s damage and the almost certain ravages to come. And when the watered-down-to-nothing climate bill died in the Senate that July, he let loose with a much-quoted broadside headlined “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.” As though finally venting emotions long suppressed (he’s a native New Englander, after all), he wrote with trademark but now seething understatement: “I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday school teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.”

Still every bit the soft-spoken, self-effacing speaker — and still witty, even laugh-out-loud funny, on stage – McKibben has both darkened and toughened his message. It’s as though, as a man of faith, he’s discovered his “prophetic voice.” (In all seriousness, you should hear him preach sometime. He knows how to use a pulpit.) He may not thunder — that will never be his style — but he’s become, I want to say, a sort of Jeremiah. (I’m sure he’d reject the comparison.)

McKibben seems to have remembered a basic truth of transformative social movements: that they’re driven not merely by positive visions — much less any simplistic, poll-tested “win-win” market optimism — but by sheer moral outrage at some deep, intolerable injustice. The movements that change the world are moral struggles.

At a key moment, maybe the key moment, in McKibben’s Do the Math talk, he plays a video clip of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson at the Council on Foreign Relations in June. McKibben eviscerates him in a darkly comic back-and-forth that would make Jon Stewart proud. Tillerson, having made news by acknowledging that climate change is real, and that warming “will have an impact,” goes on to express confidence that “we’ll adapt.”

“It’s an engineering problem, with engineering solutions,” intones the onscreen Tillerson — who, as McKibben notes on stage, makes $100,000 a day.

“No,” McKibben replies. “It’s a greed problem. Yours.”

On Saturday, after McKibben, Leonard, and the rest of 350′s small production crew ran through the Do the Math script in the empty, echoing, freezing-cold Ira Allen Chapel, I tagged along with them for lunch a short walk from the UVM campus. Over soup, basmati rice, and lentils, McKibben and I had a chance to talk, and I asked him how the idea for the tour had been born.

It all goes back, he said, to that seminal 2011 report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative in London. When McKibben and friend Naomi Klein, a 350.org board member, read the U.K. report early last spring — and saw the numbers — they both realized the implications.

“It exposed a real vulnerability of the fossil fuel industry,” McKibben told me, “because it made clear what the outcome of this process was going to be if we continued.”

There was a long pause. “There’s always been this slight unreality to the whole climate change thing,” he continued. “Because most people, at some level, kept thinking — and rightly so — Yeah, but no one will ever actually do this. No one will actually, knowingly, destroy the planet by climate change. But once you’ve seen those numbers, it’s clear, that’s exactly what they’re knowingly planning to do. So that changes the equation, you know?”

Without making any apologies for the fossil fuel industry, I noted that the people who built the industry didn’t set out to wreck the planet. It’s an incredible historical accident that we ended up in this position.

McKibben nodded. There was, of course, “a sound historical reason” for the development of fossil fuels. “But that sound historical reason vanished the minute Jim Hansen basically explained, 25 years ago, that we’re about to do in the Earth. And now that we’ve melted the Arctic — it’s well under way — at this point, it’s outrageous, is all it is.”

That sort of gut-level outrage, I suggested, is very different from the sort of positive messaging we’ve been told will motivate people to act on climate.

“There’s been an endless discussion over the years, among people in the climate community, about the right framing or messaging, or whatever,” McKibben told me. “I’ve never paid that much attention to it. Because I’ve always had fairly good luck getting people to listen simply by saying what seemed obvious to me — each time we got a new set of facts, explaining it, setting it out.”

That raised my eyebrows, I admit. Then came the kicker: “Now we have the new, and in some ways, the most important set of facts since the original science around climate. This stuff on who owns what, in terms of reserves — it’s the Keeling Curve of climate economics and politics. These are the iconic numbers for understanding where we are now.”

So can divestment, I asked, be an effective strategy? Can it generate enough economic leverage to make a difference?

“I think it’s a way to a get a fight started,” McKibben said without hesitation, “and to get people in important places talking actively about the culpability of the fossil fuel industry for the trouble that we’re in. And once that talk starts, I think it does start imposing a certain kind of economic pressure. Their high stock price is entirely justified by the thought that they’re going to get all their reserves out of the ground. And I think we’ve already made an argument that it shouldn’t be a legitimate thing to be doing.”

In other words, as in South Africa, as with Big Tobacco, there’s economic leverage in the moral case?

“Absolutely.”

What, then, I wanted to know, is the “theory of change,” right now, in Bill McKibben’s mind?

“It’s not a question of coming up with the right set of policies,” he said. “Nobody’s really come up with a new set of policy stuff for 20 years. We just haven’t ever tried the things that the economists all told us to try, because the fossil fuel industry got in the way. So it’s about figuring out what power is in the way.

“Look, our job as organizers, our most important job, is to take the next step — throw a big rock in the pond, see what ripples it creates, and then figure out how to surf those and how to launch the next one. We think that if we’re able to explain to people what the fossil fuel industry is doing, it will weaken their position — weaken it morally, politically, and economically. And that will make more things possible than are possible now.”

For all the cheering and whooping, the real emotional climax of the Burlington show came midway through, when musical guest Anais Mitchell sang a devastating, solo-acoustic cover of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” With images of this summer’s epic flooding in the Philippines on the screen behind her, Mitchell’s performance not only evoked the civil rights, antiwar, and early environmental movements of the ’60s. Her high, piercing vocal also captured the sadness and fear behind McKibben’s numbers. It was cathartic, I think, for the audience. It certainly was for me.

But McKibben’s presentation, and the whole Do the Math show, evokes much more than those emotions of sadness and fear. It also articulates what had been missing from climate advocacy, at least in public, for so long — that sense of outrage.

And yet, if anything, the show doesn’t punch hard enough. It spells out the new carbon math, and it shows us those human faces, but it never really spells out what science tells us are the all-too-likely impacts of runaway warming. It doesn’t paint the nightmare vision of the planet today’s children and future generations could inhabit if the fossil fuel industry and its political enablers have their way — what Joe Romm aptly calls “hell and high water,” and what McKibben himself already portrayed in Eaarth. New research suggests that 400,000 people are already dying around the world each year from the effects of climate change, a number that could well rise into the millions. The show could lay such numbers — such math — at the industry’s feet.

In fact, there’s another Dylan song that might be a better, more fitting, anthem. “You that hide behind desks/I just want you to know/I can see through your masks,” Dylan sings in “Masters of War.” Only now, instead of the bomb-building military-industrial complex, it’s the planet-burning carbon-industrial complex Dylan could be addressing. “You’ve thrown the worst fear/That can ever be hurled,” he practically spits. “Fear to bring children/Into the world …”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

Some of the hardest, toughest, most prophetic song lyrics ever written. And if I have any advice for McKibben and my friends at 350.org, I’d humbly suggest that’s exactly the kind of thing we need. Maybe not Dylan; we need newer voices. But we also need that fierce moral indictment — pointed where it belongs, at the perpetrators of the crime unfolding against humanity and the Earth.

Full disclosures: Bill McKibben is a member of the Grist board of directors. Wen Stephenson serves on the volunteer working board of Better Future Project, a nonprofit in Cambridge, Mass., that works closely with 350.org, and he helped launch the volunteer grassroots network 350 Massachusetts, in which he is active.

James Gustave Speth, who goes by “Gus” and speaks with a soft South Carolina drawl, is nobody’s picture of a radical. His resume is as mainstream and establishment as it gets: environmental advisor to Presidents Carter and Clinton, founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and World Resources Institute, administrator of the U.N. Development Program, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now a professor at Vermont Law School, and distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Time magazine has called him the “ultimate insider.”

And yet this elder environmental statesman, author of the acclaimed books Red Sky at Morning (2003) and The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008), has grown ever more convinced that our politics and our economy are so corrupted, and the environmental movement so inadequate, that we can no longer hope to address the climate crisis, or our deep social ills, by working strictly within the system. The only remaining option, he argues in his forceful new book, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, is to change the system itself. And that, he knows full well, will require a real struggle for the direction and soul of the country.

Which is why, as he writes on the opening page of the new book, he was arrested in front of the White House on Aug. 20 last year — along with Bill McKibben and eventually more than 1,200 others — in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.

“My motivation,” he writes, “was climate change: After more than 30 years of unsuccessfully advocating for government action to protect our planet’s climate, I found myself at the end of my proverbial rope. Civil disobedience was my way of saying that America’s economic and political system had failed us all.”

Invoking the moral legacy of the civil rights movement, this uber-environmentalist has now written a book not about climate and the environment (though the climate crisis looms large in its pages), but about America, the path we’re on, and the path we could be on — to a far better and safer future — if enough of us are willing to fight for it.

Parts of this book are, frankly, tough to read. In the opening section, Speth looks unflinchingly, even matter-of-factly, into the abyss, spelling out just how deep the hole is that we’re in — not only environmentally but socially and economically, from rising poverty and inequality, to declining education and public health, to massive Pentagon budgets, out-of-control campaign spending, and, yes, outsized carbon emissions.

But Speth doesn’t stop there. He goes on to paint a remarkably positive vision (some will call it utopian) of an America that, he argues, is still — despite everything — within our grasp.

As a prominent figure in what’s been dubbed the “new economy” movement, centered in places like the New Economics Institute and the New Economy Network, Speth looks to underlying forces, what he calls the “operating system” driving our political economy. New-economy thinkers embrace the idea, as Gar Alperovitz wrote in The Nation last year, “that the entire economic system must be radically restructured if critical social and environmental goals are to be met.” They want to build an economy “that is increasingly green and socially responsible … based on rethinking the nature of ownership and the growth paradigm.” As Speth shows, real-world models — from genuine progress indicators to employee-owned corporations and co-operatives to Transition Town initiatives and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies — are all around us.

At the heart of Speth’s vision, then, is a “sustaining, post-growth economy.” And yet it will never be more than a vision, he argues, without a transformative progressive movement for far-reaching democratic reforms (starting, perhaps, by rolling back Citizens United) coupled with urgent action to prevent catastrophic climate disruption in the decades ahead.

It’s a tall order. But Speth sketches — in the book and the interview here — what he argues is a plausible scenario, one he believes we can already see starting to play out. If it sounds merely wishful to you, it seems only fair to ask, at a time like this, whether you have a better plan — and whether you believe business as usual is really an option.

I spoke with Speth by phone on Friday, Sept. 7, the morning after President Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You’ve been advocating for action on climate change, at the highest levels, for more than 30 years, beginning in President Carter’s White House.

A. I’m quoted in a New York Times article in January 1981, based on a report we were getting out in the last days of the Carter administration, saying we’ve concluded that the buildup of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere, should not be allowed to exceed 50 percent over the preindustrial level. So, over 30 years ago we knew enough to have a crude idea about the amount that could be tolerated in the atmosphere, and of course we now know that it almost certainly should be lower than that.

Q. Right, because 50 percent over preindustrial levels would be, what?

A. 420. And we’re on the verge of 400 — it hit 400 in the Arctic recently. Most everybody I know would fall on their knees to give thanks if they thought that we were somehow magically going to stop at 420.

Q. In your chapter describing the severity of the climate crisis, you conclude, “The world is firmly on the path to a ruined planet in the lives of today’s children.” Now, last night, in his speech to the DNC, President Obama spoke explicitly about climate change in a way we haven’t quite heard before, certainly in a speech like that. What did you hear in President Obama’s statement? And what would you say to the president right now if you had the chance to sit down with him?

A. First, the comment that he made on climate was most welcome. It would have been good to have a little more specifics, and it would be good to hear it more often from him and his administration, which has kind of gone radio silent on the climate issue since the debacle in the Senate. But I think he was specifically referring to what was the most chilling moment, to me, in the Republican convention — when Romney used, as a laugh line, the line where Obama said he wanted to slow the rise of the oceans, and the Republican convention broke out in laughter at the idea that somebody would take climate, and climate science, seriously. I mean, wow. It’s one thing to have a good number of really off-the-wall people denying the science and running around debunking the climate issue, but to have the whole Republican convention go up in peals of laughter at the idea that somebody would want to do something about it, as a priority, was really chilling.

I think Obama responded to that, briefly, and incompletely. You can certainly fault the administration for dropping the issue in the last couple of years. Until he brings it back into the campaign a little more fully, he’s not going to have much of a mandate to move on it in the next four years. So it’s very important for him to bring it back into the political mainstream, into the discourse. I hope it’ll come back up in the debates, for example, in a much more forceful way.

Q. Obama also spoke about citizenship, and called on the country to follow him on a “harder path” to a “better place.” And former president Clinton, in his DNC speech, said that he knows America “will come back,” because “we always do.” These guys are speaking your language there — that’s basically what your book is about. But are they talking about the same “better place” that you’re talking about? Are any of our leaders really addressing the realities you’re laying out for us in your book?

A. Would I expect President Obama to start reciting from my pages in this election? I think the answer is — no. In terms of the main line of our politics today, a lot of things that I’m concerned about and write about are things for a little further down the road. They’re things we need to be preparing the ground for now, things we need to be injecting into the conversation, into our political dialogue.

What he could start talking about now are things that appear to be plausible, in terms of our politics today, and are also, at the same time, really groundbreaking — laying the seeds for much deeper change. One in particular is the need to develop alternatives to the current measurement of GDP. There are states doing genuine progress indicators, instead of looking at GDP only. There are major commissions, national and international, which have called for a richer family of measures for how the country is actually doing. Getting beyond GDP is getting to be a mainstream issue. Of course, the critique goes way back for decades. In fact, Bobby Kennedy’s last famous speech, which I quote in the book, contained a stinging critique of over-reliance on GDP as a measure of national progress.

If we had a monetized measure of sustainable economic welfare — that took into account the sustainability of progress from the environmental side, the equity issues, and other things that are accommodated in this genuine progress indicator — going toe-to-toe every quarter with GDP, we could really make some headway. I would say to him, yes, talk about growth, but not in the aggregate terms, not this GDP fetish, but talk about the things that we really want to grow. And frame policies in a way that promotes those particular things, rather than always trying to prime the pump of aggregate expansion.

There are other things, too. If we really could start moving strongly toward greater equity in our society — not just a little more tax on the very well-to-do, but a real commitment to recreating the equity that we had, say, in 1970, moving back to that level of equality, at least. Another thing he could talk about — and his administration has done some things — is incentives and support for community-level initiatives. State banks, co-ops of various types, industrial development corporations at the local level. Municipal development corporations. New types of corporations. I think the administration could provide a lot of support in that area, and it would be welcomed in communities, but in the long run I think it would be quite transformative.

Q. In all three of your books, you stress that environmentalism, and the environmental movement alone, isn’t enough to address the deep challenges we face. And it’s interesting to see how your emphasis, from book to book, has become less “environmental,” and more social and economic and political. Is that fair to say?

A. Well, my sad conclusion is that the environmental community is stuck in a rut and losing. If we just keep doing what we’re doing now, without any growth in the economy and population, we’ll ruin the planet. And yet the environmental community is still mainly working within the ambit of the things that succeeded in the ’70s.

The main line of environmentalism in the U.S. — the big national groups — were highly successful in the ’70s and did not make a series of strategic changes that were needed in the period that followed. The community kept doing what it was doing — which was lobbying, and working to raise public awareness of issues and create pressure on the Congress and administration to do things, and litigating.

They didn’t step back and realize that we’re going to have to become a mighty political force in this country. We’re going to have to get into electoral politics. We’re going to have to get outside the Beltway and start developing real grassroots strength. We’re going to have to see social justice as a huge environmental concern, because in a country where 40 percent of the families have incomes of less than twice the poverty level, you have this huge number of people, now even more so, who are economically insecure. So if you merely hint, for example, that somehow this policy might result in the rise of gasoline prices, or energy prices, people become alarmed, because they’re barely getting by as they are. So the equity issue and the environmental issue are intimately linked, and yet environmentalists have put the social justice issue off-limits.

Another area for environmental engagement has got to be prodemocracy political reform. We’re getting beat right and left because we have a deplorably corrupted political system. And if we don’t, as a community, start working with others to reform our politics, before it’s too late, we’ll never succeed. Democratic reforms should be part of the environmental agenda.

Q. You’re talking about something all-encompassing, as you say, a real progressive movement. Your last chapter is titled, simply, “The Movement,” and you quote Frederick Douglass, who said, in 1857, “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” You call the book a “manifesto.” So, what kind of a movement, and what kind of change, are we talking about? What you’re calling for could seem pretty radical to a lot of people.

A. Movements are built of many different pieces, and certainly one of those is the people who are willing to stir up a ruckus. And I give Occupy a lot of credit. When I started writing this book, I was struggling to find the data on inequality, and how much the 1% had, and the levels of disparity in our taxes, and things like that. That was a couple years ago. Occupy and the 99% movement really put those issues on the map, and millions of people are now far more aware of these issues than they would have been without what Occupy did, and is still doing. So I think the willingness to put oneself on the line, to sacrifice, is important.

The idea of a movement, in my mind, is one in which the various progressive communities really come together in a way that they have not — a fusion of progressive causes. To our regret, the forces of reaction and negativism, the Right, have come together. They’ve come together in their research work, their think tanks. They meet regularly to plot a strategy. They walk out with the same talking points, and make them well in the media. Progressives come together for particular campaigns, but they don’t have the infrastructure or the commitment to hammer out a common platform, to build a common infrastructure, and to work together on a constant basis on each other’s causes. And so part of it is a movement that would in effect take a page from the Right.

But if there’s a page we have to turn to — to see what we have to do now — it’s the civil rights movement of the ‘60s. They put it all on the line. They knew that they were being treated unfairly and unjustly, and that there was no higher calling for the future than addressing that. And I think that kind of spirit is what we need now on the broad issue of saving our politics from this creeping plutocracy and corporatocracy, and beginning to plant the seeds of deep change.

Before we ever get to deep change, though, we’re going to have to do something about climate. A lot of the changes that I want to see happen are changes that will take a while — and we haven’t got a while with the climate issue.

Q. If we have runaway, out-of-control climate disruption, all that other stuff goes out the window.

A. It just means we’ve got to walk on two legs. And over time, these deeper changes are going to be necessary to deal with the climate issue.

Q. Given the urgency of the climate situation, what are the things that we need to do right now, the immediate priorities? Should we be focused on carbon pricing — something like a carbon tax, which seems to have some bipartisan backing?

A. If a carbon tax had more political legs than any other approach, I’d certainly endorse it. And it looks like it’s picking up steam. But you can raise revenues, a lot of them, with a cap-and-trade scheme. If I had my druthers, I’d have a kind of cap-and-dividend program. You would sell allowances and use the funds to do two things: contribute to the resources of the federal government, and create a dividend, per family.

Q. You talk a lot about trying to get to “honest pricing,” throughout the economy, to deal with externalities.

A. That’s the oldest teaching in environmental economics, to get the prices right. We are very, very far from that, thanks to all the subsidies and the uncompensated externalities.

Q. You say it’s inconceivable that our current political system can solve these problems — and this is why you’re calling for a real movement that can, first and foremost, address democratic reform, things like a constitutional amendment on corporate personhood.

A. Well, that would certainly be a part of it. There are lots of different proposals, and there’s a certain amount of controversy about exactly how to do it, but you want to be sure you protect the right of our national government to regulate money in politics, through the amendment. It ought to be within the power of federal and state governments — Montana, for example, Arizona, and others that have tried to regulate in this area and had their laws struck down by the court — to regulate the influence of money in politics without being blocked by constitutional difficulties.

Equally important is passing public financing, fair elections, small-donor financing legislation, of the type introduced by Sen. Durbin and others in Congress.

But there are a host of other things. Securing the vote, for lord’s sake. Instead of people having to jump through hoops in order to vote, it ought to be the default position that you’re registered when you get to be 18. That’s the way it is in most advanced democracies today.

Q. Central to the book is the idea of building a new “sustaining, post-growth economy.” And in that context, you talk about “building the future from the bottom up,” in communities, cities and towns.

A. I think the people who’ve got the right idea about this are groups like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), an excellent network of people who are focusing on locally rooted, locally committed, environmentally sustainable enterprises, and community revitalization through that means. There are other things that are wonderful examples, like the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland. And despite all the things that have buffeted Detroit, there are a lot of exciting things going on there, having to do with new food systems, urban agriculture. There’s just a lot that can be done at the local level to build community, to build solidarity, to build a different type of economy that’s more locally rooted, and a different type of corporation, different types of ownership of corporations. It’s wonderful to see all the things going on that could be multiplied many times over — Transition Towns, other things.

So if you ask me for the big things that could lead to larger changes down the road, it would be bringing the future into the present at the local level, and coming together nationally to save our political system before it’s too late.

Q. I know there are a lot of readers, especially political journalists and the kind of people who might review this book, who will inevitably say, “Yeah, that’s all very nice and inspiring, but it’s just so much wishful thinking” — and especially that the idea of a “post-growth economy” is just an impossible sell, politically, to the American public.

A. I think the people who would take that position are either defeatists, who probably would’ve thought that a lot of other things that did happen were impossible. Or they are too much in the moment of our politics, and are not looking a little further down the road.

Q. So, the new America you envision is, in fact, possible?

A. Obviously, I think the answer is yes. It’s in the title of the book. And I think there’s still a plausible case that we haven’t lost the game, that we can still build an attractive and livable and happy future for ourselves in this country. Is it going to be easy? No. It’s going to take a protracted struggle — a real, nonviolent citizen outpouring of demand for deep change. So it’s still possible, but it’s not going to happen on the course we’re on now, with the level of demand that we have now.

In the book, I do sketch out a “theory of change,” for how system change can come about. It’s not a simple thing. But there are seven drivers, or forces for change, that fit together to make this happen. The first is continued deterioration of life in the country. Whether we continue to slide or not, I think more and more people are getting fed up.

Q. You write about a “crisis of legitimacy,” that when things get bad enough, the system itself will be delegitimized.

A. When the system doesn’t deliver, across a broad front, more and more people are going to realize that it’s the system’s fault. It’s not because we didn’t put enough money into education last year. It’s a deeper, more systemic problem.

The second force for change is crises — and I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them. Crises are moments that undermine the system. It could be environmental — any day now, we could start seeing a lot more methane being pumped out of tundra and oceans. There could also be another economic crisis.

Another force, which you see some signs of now, is what I call progressive fusion. Groups like Rebuild the Dream, organizing across a broad front of progressive issues, and progressives beginning to come out of their silos, and beginning to work together more.

Another dimension is the process of envisioning and actually building an attractive future. And that happens both ground-up and top-down. We need a vision of the type I tried to present in the book. That’s the first step: envisioning a new American dream. What is the positive future that we could be fighting for and striving for? The process of actually having that vision, creating that, is just starting. And allied with it is the idea that we need a new national story, as Bill Moyers has said, that really helps people understand how we got where we are, and how we can get where we should be going. And then the ground-up part is actually building the future in communities, in new types of corporations, and other ways.

The fifth area is transformative leadership. The political scientists talk about leaders who are transactional and leaders who are transformative. And one of the problems that Obama has had, is that people thought he was going to be a transformative leader and found him to be more of a transactional leader.

Another is protests leading to movement-building. Again, you can see things changing there — you can see Occupy, you can see the Tar Sands protests. You can see the beginnings of groups coming together — there was a process this spring of trying to train people for nonviolent direct action that was sponsored by 50 different activist groups.

And lastly, I’d say this coalescing of progressives around saving the political system, and building a strong citizen-sovereignty democracy in the country. Traditionally, after political debacles, like the 2000 election, progressives come together for a short while, and get something done. But we need to have all the progressive groups, whether they focus on tax justice or climate or anything else — jobs — all focusing on political reform in a sustained way, after this election, until we really have pushed through the changes that are needed to free us from this corporatocracy and plutocracy.

I think if you look at those drivers of deeper change, there is room for hope. You can see the beginnings of action on all these fronts. That’s why I think it’s plausible that things are going to move in the right direction. As I quote Dee Hock, “Things are much too bad for pessimism.”

Q. What do you say to someone, a young person (or anyone, really) who’s deeply concerned and frightened about the future — and may feel paralyzed and overwhelmed, and understandably cynical about the possibility of change — and doesn’t know what to do?

A. If you have a historical perspective, and are not so tied into the moment, that’s very helpful. Gar Alperovitz, who’s a friend of mine, says, “Fundamental change — indeed, radical systemic change — is as common as grass in world history.”

Q. So you’d point them to other examples of transformative change?

A. Look, I grew up in the civil rights era — I’m from Orangeburg, S.C. — and I saw that happen. And we see transformative change in the Arab world, today. Big things can happen, and have happened.

Another source of great motivation, to me, is that I am the proud parent of three children and grandparent of six, any day now. There’s no accident that the picture on the dust jacket of this book shows one of my grandchildren. We’re on such a bad track now, what we’re bequeathing to them is so frightening, that it really is quite a spur to action. If you give up, you’re in effect saying, I give up on the world that my children will have, that my grandchildren will have.

Q. There’s a sense among a lot of people, and you’ve talked about this in your books, that our crisis is as much moral or spiritual as “environmental” or political or economic. And, of course, people have been talking about some kind of fundamental shift in our cultural values, our worldview, for a long time, really since the beginning of the environmental movement — and yet, here we still are.

A. Value change, which I talk about at some length in the book, is absolutely essential to moving ahead. There are modelers, like the people at Tellus Institute and others, and the thing that makes a big difference in their success scenarios is a deep change in values and culture. So it’s essential.

On the other hand, you can’t sort of wait for the values to change. One of the things I’ve tried to develop, in two books now, is that value change is not something that we have to sit down and wait on to happen. I love this quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “The central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

We’ve got to drive deep systemic change to the point that by the end, at some point, we will have created a fundamentally new system of political economy. It won’t be the old socialism, and it won’t be today’s rapacious, ruthless capitalism. It’ll be something quite different from either. There’ll be more different types of ownership of capital, more public involvement, more democratic involvement, in ownership of capital and investment decisions. This is very important. Economic democracy, so to speak. Corporations will be reined in at the top, and new types of corporations built up from the bottom. There will be the idea of separation of corporation and state.

And those are all longer-term objectives that we can start working on now. There are others, as well. But unless we are achieving this sort of deeper, transformative change, our modest efforts at reform are going to continue to be overwhelmed.

Standing amid the Permian Basin oil fields in New Mexico last week, Mitt Romney announced an energy plan that takes “Drill, Baby, Drill” to a whole new level. Handing states control over oil, gas, and coal extraction on historically protected federal lands, he chucked a century of bipartisan policy going back to Teddy Roosevelt. For Mitt, it’s “speak politely and carry a big drill.”

The moment reminded us — as you can bet we’ll be reminded again this week when the GOP convenes in Tampa — what the Romney campaign, to a large extent, is really about: the untrammeled freedom to extract wealth from the commons, whatever the costs to current and future generations.

But even more, moments like this offer a window onto what historian Mark Fiege calls “an environmental history of modern conservatism.” In his magisterial new book, Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, Fiege suggests that the conservative movement itself “gathered political power from the transformation of the American landscape and in reaction to the environmental, economic, social, and political crises generated by that transformation.” In fact, he goes on, “the modern conservative movement might be understood fundamentally as an argument about nature.”

That’s just one of the provocative insights in a book that fellow historians are hailing as a landmark of environmental history. And yet Fiege’s work challenges what we even mean by “environmental history.” The chapters are as much or more about people and iconic passages or events in the American past — the Salem witch trials, the Declaration of Independence, slavery and Lincoln and the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad, the atomic bomb, Brown v. Board of Education, the early-’70s oil crisis — as about “natural” environments. You almost wonder why Fiege calls it “an environmental history” at all. It’s just history, fully told.

Which seems to be the point. While the book lacks a single, overarching narrative or argument (its chapters function as stand-alone essays on distinct topics), Fiege’s project is best seen as a kind of experiment. He demonstrates, case by case, what happens when you take the premise of environmental history — “that nature,” as he writes, “is central to the human experience” — and apply it to the kind of well-known subjects found in standard American history textbooks. “Within every famous icon, turning point, movement, or moment is a story of people struggling with the earthy, organic substances that are integral to the human predicament,” Fiege writes in his introduction, a brilliant set piece in which we’re asked to imagine ourselves ascending the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that earth-bound temple, before unearthing the story of its construction.

And yet, if Republic of Nature is fundamentally a book about how American history gets written, and what it looks like when it gets rewritten from a new or neglected perspective, it doesn’t deal much with the past 20 or 30 years — the era in which climate has become the overriding environmental (and more than environmental) issue. As I read, I wanted to ask Fiege how he thinks climate change will reshape our view of the American past — and how reinterpreting that past, including the history of the movement that gave us “Drill, Baby, Drill,” may help shape our future.

Fiege responded to my questions by email, over the course of a week, from Fort Collins, Colo., where he’s a professor of history at Colorado State University and director of its Public Lands History Center. The exchange below took place from Aug. 15-22, and has been lightly edited.

Q. I wonder how today’s children, years from now, from the vantage point of a continent and a planet — and, in all likelihood, a country — vastly altered by human-driven global warming, will view this nation’s history. I can’t help wondering how U.S. history as a whole, not just “environmental history,” may be rewritten as a result of climate. It seems it could very well change everything about how we view our past.

Mark Fiege.

A. Except for the chapter [on the early-'70s oil crisis], the book doesn’t say much about the global climate crisis. But I tried to make the story of the 1973-74 oil shock an account of the nation’s apotheosis — the petroleum-saturated “American century,” as Timepublisher Henry Luce called the 20th century, an era that helped to put into place an energy system that is now contributing to climate change.

Who knows what historians will do with climate, but the magnitude of climate and other profound problems — disease, energy, food, fresh water quality, ocean conditions, chemical toxins, warfare, and more — are simply too great to ignore and too great for historians not to ask how it is that we have come to this predicament. Environmental historians already are working on these issues: Mark Carey on glaciers and ice, Lawrence Culver on how Americans have understood and experienced climate — basically, a history of the United States through the lens of climate and perceptions of climate and climate change.

Maybe the surest sign that an awareness of climate is shaping historical consciousness will be when the popular historians turn their attention on it. When historians of the stature of Gordon Wood or Eric Foner — or, for that matter, David McCullough or Hampton Sides — focus on climate and other big-block environmental issues, then we can say that we truly are rewriting American history around the topic. As Frederick Jackson Turner once wrote, every generation rewrites the past according to the concerns uppermost in its own time. I think we are seeing signs that the rewrite is underway.

Q. So let’s talk about some specific questions that such a rewrite might address. For example, in the book’s last chapter, “Paths That Beckon,” you float the provocative idea of an “environmental history of modern [American] conservatism.” And you suggest that, in some ways, the conservative movement can be seen as a reaction to, and rejection of, not only environmentalism but actual, physical environmental pressures and “natural” limits — such as energy resources.

Now, with the Republican convention in Tampa getting underway, we’ll have an excellent opportunity to think about how that kind of historical perspective helps explain certain recurrent themes we’re likely to hear in the speeches. You know, not just the variations on “Drill, Baby, Drill,” but the outright contempt for the EPA (created, of course, in one of American history’s great ironies, by Richard Nixon) and for any attempt to regulate greenhouse emissions, or even to acknowledge the reality of human-driven global warming.

How might an “environmental history of modern conservatism” help us understand the current state of the Republican Party when it comes to issues of climate and energy? How did the party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt become the party of climate-science deniers and clean-energy opponents?

A. That is an excellent question, and here is how I would begin to think about it. During the 20th century, the United States put into place a system of policies, technologies, and infrastructures intended to extract mass quantities of natural resources from the Earth. Those resources established the material basis of the nation’s economic and military power, and they fueled — literally — a popular belief that the future would bring unending abundance and global dominance. Modern conservatism and its party, the Republicans, have become the last refuge of people still holding onto the vestiges of that older vision. Many of us, whatever our political beliefs, are deeply invested in the system that was intended to provide cheap fuel and food and to amass enormous wealth and power. Some people are willing to admit that the end is in sight; some, because the system still rewards them or because they still find the potential rewards alluring, are unwilling.

But I think the problem goes even deeper. A century of cheap hydrocarbon energy, especially oil, undergirded the construction of a transportation system that, by the late 20th century, enabled like-minded groups of Americans physically to separate from one another. It’s not as if Americans had never done this before; they had. But now the separation was a function of the modern hydrocarbon-fueled transportation system.

As I traveled across the United States promoting my book and visiting friends and family, the spatial separations in our society startled me. We have vast beige suburbs peopled largely by conservatives who most benefit from the hydrocarbon system but who are the most removed from its downsides, and many of whom attend giant drive-in mega-churches. We have the countryside with its rural conservatives who directly benefit from resource extraction or who are marginal to the entire economy and who struggle to provide for themselves. We have decrepit urban neighborhoods filled with disaffected people alienated from much of everything, especially the political system. And we have strikingly homogenous islands of moderate to liberal people centered on cities and neighborhoods such as Madison, Boulder, Berkeley, Capitol Hill in Seattle, Hyde Park in Chicago, Georgetown in the District of Columbia, Center City in Philadelphia, or, for that matter, Old Town and Mountain Avenue in Fort Collins.

It is important not to engage in stereotypes. Nonetheless, I think the general pattern holds true, and that it has corroded our social and political order, obstructed the formation of political coalitions that might move policy forward, and allowed conservatives to isolate themselves spatially from the rest of society and there perpetuate preposterous ideas such as that evolution is a lie or that global warming is a hoax. Vaclav Smil, one of our foremost scholars of energy, maintains that too much energy can foster social pathologies; perhaps, in light of modern American environmental history, he is correct.

Q. There’s a real element of tragedy, and of tragic irony, in many of your chapters: whether the story of cotton and slavery, the building of the transcontinental railroad, or the development of the atomic bomb. In each of these three cases, the effort to exert control over nature, both non-human and human, leads to incalculable suffering. Is the arc of our environmental history both tragic and ironic?

A. It’s ironic that the biological needs of enslaved laborers conflicted with, and sometimes undercut, the biological and agronomic needs of the cotton that the planters forced them to tend. It’s ironic that the railroad, a powerful agent of resource extraction and destruction (think of all that ore, all of those forests, all of those bison), now is one of our most energy-efficient forms of transportation. It’s ironic that the bomb, the supreme instrument of U.S. global power and domination, also is a source of profound instability and fear.

I draw this analysis of irony from the thought and writing of the [20th-century American] theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who also had a lot to say about tragedy. Irony, Niebuhr said, often yields bitter laughter. (What fools we are!) When we see through the irony, we enter the realm of the tragic, and our laughter turns to tears. (Merciful God! What have I done? Or: Merciful God! What an awful choice I must make!) The ironic choice is the uncritical acceptance of the bomb or any other part of our hydrocarbon civilization. The tragic choice is the realization that we have bombs, reactors, refineries, dams, and so much more — the list is endless — and that we must steward these things while we build a new way of life that will minimize our reliance on them if not enable us to abandon them altogether. Or, if we want to stop using these things right now, then we must accept and cope with the immediate consequences of our actions.

Q. I was especially affected by the stories of the Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos, and the horror mixed with fascination that many of them felt when it became clear what they’d created. And I confess that I can’t help thinking we’re all a bit like those scientists now, here at the dawn of the Anthropocene — forced to contemplate what we’ve unleashed on the planet, and on future generations, including our own children and grandchildren. It appears that what our fossil-fueled industrial economies have set in motion is quite possibly as momentous, and potentially destructive, as the nuclear threat. How do you take that on board, both as a historian and personally (as if the two can, or ever should, be separated)?

A. We are in a Niebuhrian moment, but tragedy, as Niebuhr said, is not without hope. It is important for some people to retreat to principle and deliver uncomfortable criticisms; it is equally important for some people to take responsibility for environmentally and morally objectionable things, not to perpetuate them, but to control and dispose of them. Some people must take the courageous and tragic risk of the Nobel physicist Hans Bethe, who chose to keep his security clearance and work on the hydrogen bomb not because he believed in it — he didn’t — but because he believed that his work on it would give him the moral and political leverage necessary to help prevent its use.

I also wonder if some of us might reconsider our objection to words such as “growth” and “improvement.” If we believe, as Edward Abbey supposedly said, that growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, then we have conceded one of the most powerful and hopeful words in the American idiom to people who define it as the limitless extraction of resources from the Earth and the unending accumulation of wealth for the few. I believe we must seize control of that word and define it for what it is—an organic process that is at the heart of all the living things we hold dear, including our children, and that underlies our faith that springtime, rebirth, will come to us again. Same with improvement, a classic American concept deeply engrained in our nation’s history — let’s redefine that word to describe our ongoing, patriotic effort to learn about nature and align our lives with it in innovative ways that will make us better, sustain us and other living things, and maintain our republic for as long as possible, if not forever.

Niebuhr said that living in an awareness of humanity’s tragic limits—including its natural, physical limits—brings us closer to God’s grace. As scholar and citizen, in all that I do, I’m a flawed and tragic child. But the study of American environmental history has confirmed my belief that the past holds innumerable examples of possibilities that, if followed, can bring us closer to a future that we want and must have.

Q. That idea of “improvement,” as you show in the book, was central to the life and thought of Abraham Lincoln. And for Lincoln, it wasn’t just about canals and infrastructure, but our whole relationship to “nature,” and what kind of a people, and a republic, we would be — whether or not we had it in us to “improve” ourselves, find our “better angels.”

And by putting Lincoln so squarely at the center of your book, you also put race at the center of it — and justice. Maybe “justice” — social and environmental and generational justice — becomes the most important word in the American lexicon now. And maybe figures from Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. (to name a few), point us to the only kind of politics, and political leadership, that can redeem us.

A. By the time I completed the book, I was convinced that the black freedom struggle, and black conceptions of it, compose the defining theme in the American experience — that African American history is, in effect, American history.

The story is about redemption, about a group of Americans redeeming themselves and in the process redeeming the republic by compelling it to fulfill its greatest promise. It is providential, a kind of alternative manifest destiny that is not about conquest, but about a people rescuing their shared future and realizing their ultimate purpose. It also occurs in nature. The people migrate through toil and trouble and an awesome landscape in search of shelter and repose, a place where they can align themselves with God’s vision for the Earth.

Without dismissing the story’s separatist strains, it is possible to see universalism in it. Like King calling out from the mountaintop, it says, in effect, come join us, because this journey, this struggle, ultimately is the struggle of humanity itself. I suspect that if we are to create an optimal future for the next generation, our chances increase to the extent that we can adopt some version of this inspiring story.

350.org volunteer Mark Schwaller on Tuesday before the Radiohead show. (Photo by Sam Parker.)

The amphitheater formerly known as Great Woods, at the edge of a large conservation area in Mansfield, Mass., is now called the Comcast Center. Given that the headliner there on Tuesday night was Radiohead — a band that famously dropped its major corporate label, once touted Naomi Klein’s No Logo, and is now teaming up with the grassroots climate activists of 350.org — the name dripped a fitting irony.

Not that Radiohead has ever had a problem with contradiction or cognitive dissonance. Arty, cerebral darlings of serious post-boomer, meta-critical rock, they’ve made a career and some pretty great music out of it — doing their best to subvert techno-consumer culture by its own devices for a good two decades.

So whatever else I may have felt, as a longtime Radiohead listener meeting up with a dozen fellow 350.org volunteers at the Comcast Center to help recruit concert-goers for the climate fight, the ironic dissonance of the setting made a certain sense. I mean, you have to admit: There’s something slightly dissonant about Radiohead as mood music for the climate movement. The band’s vibe — ethereal but intense, more than a little dark at times, even manic-depressive — may match many a climate activist’s state of mind more often than we’d like to admit. But it’s hardly an obvious fit with the bright, “Yes we can!” spirit of a 350 rally. Which is to say, don’t worry: There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re not missing some subtle coded message, if the 350 logo doesn’t pop into your head when you hear Thom Yorke sing.

But this leg of Radiohead’s King of Limbs tour — Tuesday’s concert was the first of at least 10 U.S. shows where 350 has been given prime real estate to set up its tent and make its pitch — may begin to change that. And I hope it does, for more reasons than may be obvious.

To begin with, it has to be said: The music industry, and the big-bucks live-music industry in particular, is a pretty good symbol of a civilization barreling its way toward the brink of climate catastrophe. The mega-wattage, the fossil-fueled mileage (both band’s and audience’s), the concessions and merchandise, the sheer size of a single large concert’s carbon footprint (despite any offsets or green LEDs) — all for a few fleeting hours of escape, the communal contact hit that only a mass of human bodies moving to the same beat, staring at the same light show, can deliver. And then the spectacle rolls (or flies) on.

The guys in Radiohead are fully conscious of all this, of course. They’re nothing if not self-aware. And even as they’ve ventured now and then into political causes, they’ve avoided the kind of outsized (if sincere) do-goodism of some other rock stars. So when Stephen Colbert put the topic of climate change to Yorke and guitarist Ed O’Brien last fall, mischievously noting the fossil-fuel dependence of what they do (“Did you guys come here on an oxcart? … Are you living an oil-free lifestyle?”), they played it cool and didn’t take the bait or try to rationalize (though they have made real efforts to lower their tours’ footprint). Yorke talked about oil-industry campaign funding instead. Smart man, on message. He knows the climate fight isn’t simply about personal or corporate responsibility, it’s about large-scale politics.

Which shouldn’t be surprising. He’s not exactly a rookie. Yorke joined with Friends of the Earth in 2005 to help launch The Big Ask, the U.K. political campaign aimed at carbon emissions. In 2009, he went to Copenhagen. In 2010, he teamed up for the first time with 350.org on its 350 EARTH “global art project,” bringing more than 1,000 people together in Brighton to create an image of King Canute on the beach (he who attempted to hold back the tide). Now he’s bringing 350 on tour.

“Every successful movement has had music,” 350′s Jamie Henn says in an email, “and the climate movement is no different. We couldn’t be more excited for Radiohead to be providing part of the soundtrack.”

So, what about that part of the soundtrack? There’s still the question of the aesthetic and the mood of the music, and what it signifies.

Much, much (too much?) has been written about Radiohead’s music, and I make no claim to originality here. I’ve been drawn back recently to the astute, classical- and jazz-informed take on the band by The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross in a long (and brilliant) 2001 profile and to a brainy 2006 essay by Mark Greif, titled “Radiohead, Or the Philosophy of Pop,” in the Brooklyn-based journal n+1. To be sure, all the analysis can get tiring. “Really, we don’t want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff,” drummer Phil Selway told Ross. “What we do is pure escapism.” Or as Yorke added: “We’re fallible, this is fallible … We want to kind of mellow it all out a bit. Just chill the fuck out.”

Easier said than done, mates. In his essay, Greif pinpoints “the first notable quality” of Radiohead’s music: “the evocation … of unending low-level fear.” He goes on:

The dread in the songs is so detailed and so pervasive that it seems built into each line of lyrics and into the black or starry sky of music that domes it. It is environing fear, not antagonism emanating from a single object or authority. It is atmospheric rather than explosive …

Meanwhile, in the lyrics, and “in the musical counterpoint of chimes, strings, lullaby,” Greif hears “a desperate wish for small, safe spaces” — for “sanctuary.” But, he adds, “when the songs try to defend the small and safe, the effort comes hand-in-hand with grandiose assertions of power and violence,” as though from out of “our dread-filled contemporary universe.” And he quotes (from OK Computer‘s “Karma Police“):

This is what you get,
this is what you get,
this is what you get,
when you mess with us.

An atmospheric dread. A desperate wish for sanctuary. Power and violence of the contemporary universe (This is what you get when you mess with Mother Nature!). Step right up. “It is the 21st century,” York sings on “Bodysnatchers” (from 2007′s In Rainbows).

But soundtrack for the climate movement? Radiohead is what we listen to in our private, introspective, not to say despairing, moments — “alone, with earphones on,” as one young 350 volunteer named Jessica said to me. She has a hard time hearing it as pump-up music for a climate rally. There at the Comcast Center before the show, holding clever signs (“Karbon Police”) and making earnest, upbeat conversation with concertgoers who drifted over, I knew what she meant.

And yet, the more I think about it, maybe the climate movement can stand to take on a little more of the stark, honest emotion found in Radiohead’s songs. And I don’t just mean in private, with earphones on; I mean out in the open and into the mix.

Because it seems to me, as well as to a lot of climate activists I know, that we’ve reached the point where intellectual honesty about climate change requires not only an understanding of what science is telling us, but just as much, a kind of emotional honesty about the situation we’re in — about what a world of greater than 2 degrees C warming this century will likely mean. It may also require embracing the contradictions that arise when you build a truly broad-based, mass movement that transcends old categories (“environmentalism,” “conservation”) and ideological orthodoxies — and that uses the tools and arts of the techno-consumer culture to subvert and transform the culture from within.

OK, so you still don’t think Radiohead and the climate movement go together? You’re right. They don’t. Which is what might make them a paradoxically perfect fit for this dread-filled, dissonant moment of ours.

Radiohead closed the show on Tuesday night with the scarily beautiful “Reckoner” from In Rainbows. Call it mood music for a moment of reckoning, but with more grace and beauty than dread.

Reckoner
You can’t take it with you
Dancing for your pleasure …

Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
All human beings

“Something about Radiohead inspires a disorienting kind of hope,” Ross wrote in 2001. Something about that assessment still rings true.

Paul Kingsnorth.

Not everyone is quite ready to hear, or accept, what Paul Kingsnorth has to say.

An English writer and erstwhile green activist, he spent two decades (he’ll turn 40 this year) in the environmental movement, and he’s done with all that. And not only environmentalism — he’s done with “hope.” He’s moved beyond it. He’s not out to “save the planet.” He’s had it with the dream of “sustainability.” He’s looked into the abyss of planetary collapse, and he’s more or less fine with it: Collapse? Sure. Bring it on.

In 2009, he founded, together with collaborator Dougald Hine, something called the Dark Mountain Project. A kind of loose literary collective — with a website, annual Dark Mountain anthology, an arts festival and other gatherings — it’s a cultural response to our global environmental, economic, and political crises. “Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto” appeared that summer and got some attention, mostly in the U.K. Kingsnorth and Hine have summed up their message this way:

These are precarious and unprecedented times … Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact.

We don’t believe that anyone — not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers — is really facing up to the scale of this … Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilization from self-destruction.

Well, we don’t buy it. This project starts with our sense that civilization as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse — which is already beginning — could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.

Some have called Kingsnorth a catastrophist, or fatalist, with something like a death wish for civilization (see John Gray in The New Statesman and George Monbiot in The Guardian). Others might call him a realist, a truthteller. If nothing else, I’d call him a pretty good provocateur.

Kingsnorth tossed a grenade in the January/February issue of Orion Magazine with his controversial essay “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.” There, Kingsnorth gets to the heart of his case. “We are environmentalists now,” he writes, “in order to promote something called ‘sustainability.’ What does this curious, plastic word mean? … It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people — us — feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so.”

Ouch. But he isn’t finished.

If “sustainability” is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the world worth talking about. … Carbon emissions threaten a potentially massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. … If we cannot sort this out quickly, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing our own carrots and other such unthinkable things.

Well, then. I see. Let it burn.

Of course, the obvious answer to this (as most Grist readers would probably agree) is that if we don’t keep talking about carbon and climate, and start acting in a serious way to address them, the consequences will be a whole lot more “unthinkable” than darning socks and growing carrots, and for a whole lot more people (especially those non-rich, non-Western folks Kingsnorth cares about) than he’s acknowledging here.

Nevermind. Kingsnorth’s answer to the whole situation comes down to one word: withdrawal. “It’s all fine,” he writes at the end the essay. “I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching … I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.”

Look, I’m all for walking. And there are things about that essay I genuinely admire — especially the way it nails the state of anxiety in which environmentalism seems to find itself today. But withdraw? Really? The fact that the essay appeared in the same issue as Terry Tempest Williams’ long, morally bracing interview with Tim DeChristopher, “What Love Looks Like,” only made it harder to take. This, I felt, is what giving up looks like.

Kingsnorth and I recently engaged in a long and spirited email exchange on the blog I edit at Thoreau Farm in Concord, Mass. Surprisingly enough, however, it didn’t end in bitterness and gnashing of teeth. We somehow stepped down off our “platforms,” and found a way, not to agree, but at least to peacefully coexist. We’re both, I think, just trying to define — like many, many others — what hope looks like, even now.

Here are excerpts from the exchange. I’ve tried to do justice to Kingsnorth’s responses, but they can be read in full here and here.

Stephenson:

[You write] “We are entering an age of massive disruption, and our task is to live through it as best we can.” Indeed. But you seem to reject the possibility that any combination of mass political engagement and human technological (and yes, industrial-economic) ingenuity might help us do just that: live through it as best we can. For a literary project, that seems like an odd failure of imagination.

To dismiss the search for “solutions” — which I assume must include efforts to stabilize the climate in the coming century — seems a bit too cynical, or fatalistic. As if to say that nothing can be done. At the very least, we can still work urgently to minimize the human (and non-human) suffering that is coming.

Unless we find ways to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, it will be the end of the world (or of humanity), full stop.

Kingsnorth:

“Unless we find ways to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere, it will be the end of the world (or of humanity), full stop.”

This is an interesting statement for this reason: that it elides modern human civilisation and the living planet. They are not the same thing. They are very far from being the same thing; in fact, one of them is allergic to the other. If we don’t start to realise this — really get it, at a deep level — there will be no change worth having for anyone.

I have spent 20 years and more as an environmental campaigner. My worldview has always been, for want of a less clunky word, ecocentric. What I care passionately about is nature in the round: all living things, life as a phenomenon. That’s not an anti-human position — it would be impossible for it to be so, because humans are as natural as anything else. But my view is that humans are no more or less important than anything else that lives. Whether or not our current (temporary and hugely destructive) way of life is ‘sustainable’ is not of great concern to me, except insofar as it impacts on life as a whole.

I do think that climate change campaigners like yourself should be more upfront about what you’re trying to ‘save.’ It’s not the world. It’s not humanity either, which I’d bet will survive whatever comes in some form or another, though perhaps with drastically reduced numbers and no broadband connection. No, what you’re trying to save, it seems to me, is the world you have grown used to.

“Sustainability” is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture — this lifestyle — afloat. The modern human economy is an engine of mass destruction. Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don’t want to.

But I do feel the need to be honest with myself, which is where the ‘walking away’ comes in. I am trying to walk away from dishonesty, my own included. Much environmental campaigning, and thinking, is dishonest. It has to be, to keep going.

I don’t think any “climate movement” is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: We are all climate change. It is not the evil “1%” destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in. I am climate change. You are climate change. Our culture is climate change. And climate change itself is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, if you’ll pardon the terrible but appropriate pun. If we were to wake up tomorrow to the news that climate change were a hoax or a huge mistake, we would still be living in a world in which extinction rates were between 100 and 1000 times natural levels and in which we have managed to destroy 25 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last four decades alone.

How do we live with this reality? Politics is not going to do anything about it, Wen, because politics is the process of keeping this Machine moving. Living with this reality — living in it, facing it, being honest about it and not having to pretend we can ‘solve’ it as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle — seems to me to be a necessary prerequisite for living through it. I realize that to some people it looks like giving up. But to me it looks like just getting started with a view of the world based on reality rather than wishful thinking.

I don’t want to sound like a nihilist. There are a lot of useful things that we can do at this stage in history. Protecting biodiversity seems the crucial one. Protecting non-human nature from more destruction by the Machine. I’m all for fighting winnable battles.

You asked me about hope for the future: The thought that the disaster we have created may help us see ourselves for what we are — animals — and not what we believe we are — gods — gives me a kind of hope.

Stephenson:

We agree that human beings are, as Thoreau once wrote, “part and parcel of Nature.” You (and others) call this perspective ecocentric, but I dislike that term — it’s weighted toward the “eco-,” as something distinct from the human, the “anthro-,” and so still clings to a dualistic man-vs.-nature mindset. Personally, I value the human every bit as much as the non-human.

Where I think we differ — and please correct me if I’m wrong — is that you are driven primarily by a desire to restore what you’d say is a proper relationship between humanity and non-human nature. And it’s as though you welcome an inevitable collapse insofar as it aids or hastens this correction.

While I believe correcting our relationship to the non-human is a noble ideal, I’m primarily driven — and I know plenty of others who are as well — by a desire to prevent as much suffering as possible in the decades to come. I guess I’m with Tim DeChristopher on this. As he tells Terry Tempest Williams, “I would never go to jail to protect animals or plants or wilderness. For me, it’s about the people.” It’s a humanitarian imperative. It transcends environmentalism and environmental politics.

So it’s simply wrong to suggest that someone like Tim DeChristopher went to prison to save our consumer civilization — to save shopping malls. He went to prison to save lives….

We’re not going to stop global warming at this point. But we may still be able to preserve a livable planet. There’s every reason to think that a last-ditch effort to cut carbon emissions — together with serious adaptation efforts at all levels, and local grassroots movements to create resilient local communities — will help prevent or alleviate the suffering of countless numbers of people in the latter half of this century. People who will have done nothing to cause the situation they inherit. It’s not about sustaining our current lifestyles, or getting ourselves off the hook. It’s about giving future generations a fighting chance. It’s about giving my own children — and everyone else’s — a fighting chance.

Kingsnorth:

I wonder what it is that makes me so “ecocentric,” and you such a humanist? I wonder what fuels my sense of resignation, and my occasional sneaking desire for it all to come crashing down, and what fuels your powerful need for this thing called hope. Whenever I hear the word “hope” these days, I reach for my whisky bottle. It seems to me to be such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?

This may sound a strange thing to say, but one of the great achievements for me of the Dark Mountain Project has been to give people permission to give up hope. What I mean by that is that we help people get beyond the desperate desire to do something as impossible as ‘save the Earth’, or themselves, and start talking about where we actually are, what is actually possible and where we are actually coming from.

I don’t think we need hope. I think we need imagination. We need to imagine a future which can’t be planned for and can’t be controlled. I find that people who talk about hope are often really talking about control. They hope desperately that they can keep control of the way things are panning out. Keep the lights on, keep the emails flowing, keep the nice bits of civilisation and lose the nasty ones; keep control of their narrative, the world they understand. Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult.

The Tim DeChristopher quote which you use approvingly is something which divides us. I admire anyone who can go to prison for their beliefs (well, not anyone, it rather depends what those beliefs are) but I’m of the opinion that the last thing the world needs right now is more “humanitarians.” What the world needs right now is human beings who are able to see outside the human bubble, and understand that all this talk about collapse, decline, and crisis is not just a human concern. When I look to the future, the thing that frightens me most is not climate change, or the possibility of the lights going out in the lit-up parts of the world, it’s that we may keep this ecocidal civilization going long enough to take everything down with it.

I feel I have to respond to all of this by giving up hope, so that I can instead find some measure of reality. So I’ve let hope fall away from me, and wishful thinking too, and I feel much lighter. I feel now as if I am able to look more honestly at the way the world is, and what I can do with what I have to give, in the time I have left. I don’t think you can plan for the future until you have really let go of the past.

Stephenson:

I can understand the need to let go of “hope,” conventionally defined. But I think what you’re doing here is redefining it — for yourself, at least, and maybe for others gathering with you for your dark mountain trek. If you want to jettison the word altogether, as a piece of that past we must let go of, very well. But you’ve clearly found something — or at least started the search for something! — which keeps you going. And who am I to take that away from you or anyone?

Walden Pond.Photo: Troy B. Thompson

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? … Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.

So spoke Henry David Thoreau, that inveterate nature walker, to an audience in Framingham, Mass., on July 4, 1854, in his great abolitionist address called “Slavery in Massachusetts.” The times and the country have changed, but the words still ring in our ears.

This Saturday, Sept. 24, I’ll be walking with friends and neighbors to Walden Pond, six miles up the road from where I live in Wayland, Mass. We’ll pass a lot of beautiful scenery — historic conservation land, the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge along the Sudbury River, organic community-supported farms — but this won’t be any serene nature walk. From Walden, we’ll head to the Concord train station and take the commuter rail (the same Fitchburg line Henry Thoreau knew) into Boston, where we’ll join in the historic worldwide rally for climate action, Moving Planet, and demand that our leaders at all levels get serious about moving beyond fossil fuels.

“Ah, Walden,” you’re thinking. “Of course. Environmentalism. Thoreau. Walden Woods. Don Henley. Right on, man.”

Actually, wrong. Or I should say, only partly right. I’ll be walking to Walden because, like the writings that made it famous, this is about far more than environmentalism. It’s about our humanity.

Henry David Thoreau’s great subject — in Walden and “Civil Disobedience” and just about everything he wrote — wasn’t the environment (a term he wouldn’t recognize) or even nature (though he was a first-rate naturalist). It was “Nature,” as he wrote in his central essay, “Walking,” and “man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature.” It was our relationship, as human beings — physically, morally, spiritually, politically — to the world in which we live, which is to say, to everything, both human and wild. When he wrote, in that same essay, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world,” he didn’t mean wilderness as we think of it today, but the wildness — life, freedom — within us all. “The most alive,” he wrote, “is the wildest.” And when he wrote, in Walden, that he went to the woods “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” the emphasis was on the words “live” and “life” — as in, how to live authentically as a human being in relation to both nature and other human beings, because the two can’t really be separated.

All of which is to say that Thoreau was not merely an “environmental” writer (though he tops a lot of environmental reading lists). He was a deeply human, moral, and spiritual writer — and a deeply political one. And he knew that on the most pressing moral questions, the spiritual and political can, and often must, go hand in hand — a conviction shared by one of Thoreau’s 20th-century readers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

There’s also a popular misconception that Thoreau was a hermit or recluse, indulging a utopian fantasy in his refuge in the woods. Recently, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, in his book Triumph of the City, even went out of his way to paint Thoreau as a kind of clueless, dreamy nature boy, out of touch with the real world, a stand-in (or straw man) for a certain kind of modern-day environmentalist. (Glaeser means well, but never let an urban economist lecture you on Thoreau.) And yet Walden isn’t about some solitary back-to-nature trip, it’s about waking up to one’s immediate reality, in the present moment, right where you live, and engaging the world. And not doing it quietly, or in isolation, but as Thoreau writes in Walden, to shout “as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”

Thoreau’s cabin at Walden was no retreat from the world, and his project was not, primarily, about the virtues of solitude. He not only kept up a social life at the pond, more to the point, he remained socially and politically engaged.

In fact if anyone took refuge in that cabin, it was the runaway slave Thoreau sheltered along the Underground Railroad. Thoreau’s antislavery activism, in words and actions, needs to be remembered as central to his legacy. For Thoreau, to be morally awake and in harmony with nature meant to act on behalf of human freedom.

In May 1854, as Thoreau was putting his final touches on Walden, another runaway slave named Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston. A riotous crowd, led by abolitionist friends of Thoreau’s, tried to free Burns from the city’s courthouse, but Burns was sent back to the South after federal troops intervened. On July 4, at the rally in Framingham, Thoreau delivered his fiery abolitionist speech “Slavery in Massachusetts” and indicted the commonwealth for its complicity in human bondage. His sense of serenity in nature was shaken. “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.”

But did remembrance of his country really spoil the walk, or remind him of the walk’s purpose? Thoreau’s immersion in nature, and his spiritual awakening there, led him back to society and its reform.

There is no greater threat to human freedom today than climate change. If slavery was the human, moral crisis of Thoreau’s time, then global warming — and its impact on countless innocent lives, starting with the poorest and most vulnerable, far and near — is the human, moral crisis of our own. We know that our burning of fossil fuels is global warming’s major cause, with vast and potentially catastrophic consequences for future generations, including our own children.

And as Thoreau knew, in the face of such facts the thing to do is not retreat, but engage.

There’s still time — if we act — to preserve a livable planet for our children. But it’s going to take more than small gestures of personal green virtue. It’s going to take decisive government action — a stiff price on carbon, major investments in clean energy, real global commitments — which means it’s going to take a political movement that transcends environmentalism. It means changing the political equation in this country, on the ground, at the grassroots. That’s what Moving Planet, this Saturday, is all about: Building a new movement. Because the climate crisis is more than an environmental crisis, it’s a human crisis, and we need a new politics to address it on those terms.

That may sound hopeless, especially now. But then, abolishing slavery sounded hopeless in 1854 — as the author of Walden, and “Slavery in Massachusetts,” no doubt knew.

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9; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} A shorter version of this piece appeared on the op-ed page of The Boston Globe on Sept. 22. Portions of it are adapted from the 5-part Slate series “Walking Home From Walden.”)

When he said that about proxies, I couldn’t help thinking of last Friday’s post by Christopher Mims, “Environmentalism is a plot to take over the world, says coalition of Evangelical Christians.” Mims picked up on the absurd 12-part video series from the right-wing Cornwall Alliance, Resisting the Green Dragon, and noted:

Climate change has split the Evangelical Christian world asunder. On one side, a minority say that the biblical edict to look out for the poor and be good stewards of God’s creation makes them natural allies of those who would limit human emissions of greenhouse gases.

On the other, a far larger group argues that climate change is a fairy tale that progressives tell their children to scare them into being good little humanists, and environmentalism is a “false gospel” that threatens to co-opt the teachings of Christ himself.

Nicely put. Except for this: It takes the “Green Dragon” bait and falls into a classic culture-war trap, publicizing the extreme Christian right, allowing it to set the terms and falsely represent the larger evangelical community. Why take the bait? Why follow them down into the quagmire?

While it’s stated like a given, the idea that the number of evangelicals buying into the extreme “Green Dragon” line is “far larger” than the number who support climate action is unsupported in Mims’ post. I’d love to see the numbers. Mims also linked to a piece I recently wrote for Slate in which I reported on the current state of the evangelical “creation care” movement. One stat in my piece may have leapt out: According to a Pew Research Center survey in October, only 16 percent of regular churchgoing white evangelicals said that global warming is a “very serious” problem (compared to 31 percent of Americans overall). What I didn’t include (but now wish I had) is this: If you combine that 16 percent with those who call it a “somewhat serious” problem, the total rises to nearly 47 percent. On the other hand, in the same survey, the combined number of evangelicals who call it either “not a problem” (31 percent) or “not too serious” (19 percent) is about 50 percent. Hmm. 

What’s more, political scientist John Green, an advisor to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, noted that 42 percent of evangelicals in that survey said global warming is a problem requiring “immediate government action.” That’s certainly not a majority, but it’s a large number (especially when you consider that evangelicals are something like 25 percent of the population). And when you compare that 42 percent to the 46 percent of Americans overall who gave Pew the same answer — I don’t know, is it possible that evangelical Americans are actually, well, not that different from other Americans?

Evangelical climate advocates like Richard Cizik, with his New Evangelical Partnership (launched earlier this year), and Jim Ball at the Evangelical Environmental Network — both of whom were behind the Evangelical Climate Initiative that turned so many heads (including Grist’s) in 2006 — will tell you that the Cornwall counter-offensive is evidence of the creation-care movement’s success. John Green, for one, agrees. There’s something going on in the evangelical community — a generational shift that the old culture warriors can’t control, and they know it. Jonathan Merritt, the 29-year-old author and creation-care advocate who launched the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative in 2008, sees an increasing willingness among his peers to work on “common ground” issues, he told me, “especially as young evangelicals come of age and leaders of the religious right fade away.”

Which brings me back to proxies — one of which is the old culture war between conservative Christianity and environmentalism. If you want to build a broader climate-action movement, then you need all the allies you can get, including in the evangelical community. Painting evangelicals — tarring them, really — with a broad brush while patting the real evangelical enviros on the head (such “lovely people,” too bad they’re totally irrelevant) is myopic and self-defeating. This is one reason so many evangelicals — including moderates and progressives — distrust “environmentalists.” What a tragedy if we let this kind of culture-war bait become an obstacle to building the bridges we need to build.

One last note: Building those bridges is more than an abstraction for me, it’s personal. My colleagues in the media are often surprised to learn that I was raised in a conservative evangelical family in Southern California, by way of Texas. I confess I’m no longer much of a churchgoer, but I’m close to my family, and I’ve still got a toe in the evangelical world. Trust me, it’s a lot more complicated than you may think. One of my sisters, a devout evangelical who lives in Nashville, is a huge fan of Al Gore.