Recently Bill McKibben’s name appeared in an New York Times Op-Ed piece by Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalogue fame and more recently author of a book, The Clock of the Long Now, about the Copenhagen Climate conference. In Brand’s essay, “There are four sides to every story”, he suggests that in addition to the denialists who refuse to believe that humans play a role in current climate disruptions, and the warners who use their scientific knowledge and the current trends to predict a future planetary disaster, the skeptics and the calamatists also have roles in this debate. The skeptics, most of them with some science background, insist that scientific consensus is impossible and that there are too many unknown factors at work to suggest that the trouble we are in is as serious as we are being told it is. The calamatists, according to Brand, are “environmentalists who believe that industrial civilization has committed crimes against nature, and retribution is coming.”
Brand, who has helped build a clock which is designed to measure time for the next 10,000 years to make the point that if we were to consider a long future, we might act differently today, sides with the “warners”, not wanting to be grouped with the calamatists, who he downplays as ideologues.
I can see his point. But I bristle a bit when he names Bill McKibben as one of the leaders of the calamatists. I know Bill, and I know that he has not given up. He’s been writing and talking about climate change for twenty years and since he teamed up with a group of young Middlebury College grads to start 350.org, (more…)
Great West Institute 
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