by Bill McKibben
As hotels think green, and airlines and businesses quest for technologies to help halt the rise of the earth’s temperature, Bill McKibben examines what it may take to turn down the heat.
Just to let you know: I’m filing this article from Concourse B at O’Hare International Airport. I’m en route to Memphis to [...]

by Bill McKibben
As hotels think green, and airlines and businesses quest for technologies to help halt the rise of the earth’s temperature, Bill McKibben examines what it may take to turn down the heat.

Just to let you know: I’m filing this article from Concourse B at O’Hare International Airport. I’m en route to Memphis to give a talk about global warming, which is a deeply ironic idea, like a dentist handing out lollipops to his young patients.

The bad news first, then. When we travel, we contribute to climate change. The carbon dioxide coming from the backs of our cars or our boats—or especially our planes—plays a substantial role in raising the earth’s temperature. In fact, it’s not too much to say that we’re putting at risk the very sights we’re traveling to see: the atoll where we relax on the beach is so threatened by rising seas that some island nations are preparing evacuation plans. The ski slopes in the Rockies and Alps are endangered by shorter winters and shrinking snowpacks—the same forces that will soon rob Glacier National Park of its remaining ice and melt the legendary snows of Kilimanjaro, revealing its less legendary rocks. As for the autumn foliage in the hills of New England, computer models show that if global warming continues on its projected course, sugar maples will begin to disappear from all regions south of the Canadian border by midcentury. At about the same time, if sea temperatures keep rising, the die-off of the world’s coral reefs will be complete. Those hot waters are also fueling the hurricanes knocking coastal resorts out of commission—and devastating entire cities. Meanwhile, the warmer seasons are drawing malaria-carrying mosquitoes into regions where they’ve never gone before.

And yet—and yet, we want to travel. We want to see the world, meet new people, learn about other cultures, widen our perspective; one of the sweetest gifts fossil fuel has given us is the sense of a larger world filled with beauty and diversity. There’s something more than a little sad about making it smaller again. We have already proved that we have the will and the power to protect nature under siege. Farmers, ranchers, second-home owners, foresters, investors, even developers make up the backbone of many of our country’s land trusts and nature conservancies, protecting millions of acres from unwise development; duck hunters have helped preserve hundreds of thousands of acres where waterfowl breed. Bird-watchers have turned flyway towns into sanctuaries where every resident knows that protecting the annual migration route means protecting their own livelihood. Now we must expend a far greater effort to figure out how to change a situation that has just as much destructive potential as an asteroid appearing from deep space: the worldwide reliance on fossil fuels.

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