BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850."


From Henry Holt, the publisher:

"Hurricane Katrina. A rapidly disappearing Arctic. The warmest winter on the East Coast in recorded history. The leading scientist at NASA warns that we have only ten years to reverse climate change; the British government’s report on global warming estimates that the financial impact will be greater than the Great Depression and both world wars—combined. Bill McKibben, the author of the first major book on global warming, The End of Nature, warns that it’s no longer time to debate global warming, it’s time to fight it.

Drawing on the experience of Step It Up, a national day of rallies held on April 14, McKibben and the Step It Up team of organizers provide the facts of what must change to save the climate and show how to build the fight in your community, church, or college. They describe how to launch online grassroots campaigns, generate persuasive political pressure, plan high-profile events that will draw media attention, and other effective actions. This essential book offers the blueprint for a mighty new movement against the most urgent challenge facing us today."


From the Introduction to "Fight Global Warming Now":

"It’s easy to join the global warming movement. We know it’s easy because we all just joined ourselves. None of us has spent long years as organizers. One of us has spent long years mostly as a writer with a little activism on the side; the rest of us haven’t spent long years doing anything except school, because we just got out of college.

But in 2007 we came together to see if we could kick up a fuss about climate change. That January 10, we launched a Web site, StepItUp2007.org. We asked people across the country to start organizing rallies for April 14, to demand that Congress cut carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. We had no money, and we had no organization, so we had no expectations. Our secret hope, which seemed a little grandiose, was that we might organize a hundred demonstrations for that Saturday, only three months away.

Instead, our idea took off. The e-mails we sent ended up spreading virally, in the way that certain ideas sometimes do on the Internet. People we’d never heard of started signing up on the Web site to host rallies in places we’d never heard of. The electronic pins stuck on our online map got thicker by the week—200, 500, 900. By the time the big day rolled around, there were 1,400 demonstrations in all fifty states, ranging from tiny to enormous. It was one of the biggest days of grassroots environmental protest since the first Earth Day in 1970, covered extensively in the national media and in thousands of local stories across the country.

Along the way we learned a few lessons and we want to share them in this book, which is designed to help you plan and carry out your own ongoing local rallies and campaigns, the way the thousands of organizers we worked with did on April 14, 2007. We agreed to write it because, one, we haven’t quite managed to solve global warming yet and, two, we gained a few hard-earned ideas for how to make the most of two things: local communities and the Internet."


From Bill McKibben's website:

"Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent...

In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With the help of six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America and gained the support of environmental, student and religious groups. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now will be published in October 2007.

Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College."


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