Bill McKibben: Talk and Booksigning on 'Deep Economy'

Albuquerque independent bookstore will host environmental realist and journalist Bill McKibben at UNM's SUB Ballroom A & B in Albuquerque at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 to talk about and sign his new book, Deep Economy. Challenging the prevailing wisdom that the goal of economies should be unlimited growth, McKibben argues that the world doesn't have enough natural resources to sustain endless economic expansion and looks at news ways to structure our civilizations. If we are to thrive or even survive within the fragile balance of nature, our definitions of concepts like "wealth"  and "growth" and "progress" must change dramatically.

A thoughtful post at The Blue Voice about the coming of the Vernal Equinox talks about McKibben's alarming but action-oriented message about the state of Planet Earth and ways we might counter the dire effects of global warming and learn to live in a manner that minimizes damage to the environment, while actually bolstering our sense of community and increasing our emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

As we find ourselves enmeshed in the dizzy day-to-day, a presidential race for the ages, mounting economic worries and complicated choices regarding Iraq and other pressing issues, a much more serious global (in every sense) question looms: how can we create sustainable communities to mitigate and survive what we know is coming as a direct result of how we've been living for the past hundred years or so?

Deep Economy tackles these issues head on:

In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better"—indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value.

McKibben's animating idea is that we need to move beyond "growth" as the paramount economic ideal and pursue prosperity in a more local direction, with cities, suburbs, and regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. He shows this concept blossoming around the world with striking results, from the burgeoning economies of India and China to the more mature societies of Europe and New England. For those who worry about environmental threats, he offers a route out of the worst of those problems; for those who wonder if there isn't something more to life than buying, he provides the insight to think about one's life as an individual and as a member of a larger community. 

... As McKibben sees it, three fundamental challenges to the fixation on growth have emerged. First, we are producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress. Second, we do not have the energy needed to keep producing more at our current rate. And third, growth is no longer making us happy. The title of DEEP ECONOMY is drawn from “deep ecology,” a term coined a generation ago by environmentalists who advocated for more attention to be paid to the choices that we make in our daily lives, rather than coming up with another set of laws as Band-Aids against environmental damage. Now, as we address economic issues as they relate to our environment and community, McKibben urges a similar shift in our thinking. He offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. As he so eloquently shows, the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own.

Besides being a prolific writer, McKibben is a creative environmental activist:

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 six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. 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 was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

As we move into Spring and experience once more the awakening and greening of our high desert ecosystems, it seems like a perfect time to share some time with McKibben and his ideas for creating Deep Economy.