Bill McKibben: Yes.

Bill McKibben: Well, what can I say? I’m a Methodist Sunday School teacher. For me, this has always been part of my reason for caring about the environment, this sense that we’re talking about this creation. So we wanted very much to involve this community that hadn’t been involved as deeply as it should. Every important American social movement that I can think of has required the participation of the church to get its message across and I think that the environment is no exception. And I think it’s really starting to happen.

Bill McKibben: I don’t know to what extent it’s been a failure, but it’s certainly been an important part of our work over the years.

Bill McKibben: Yeah! I think you could run it the other way, too, and say it’s been a major failing of faith communities over the years not to understand that one of the things that they’re called upon to do is witness to and protect the integrity of creation. There have been too many examples of faith communities whose involvements in issues like hunger and social justice and whatever is incredibly episodic and limited largely to giving people tents after they’ve had some terrible disaster and very little to figuring out what the real root causes of all these problems are.

Bill McKibben: In this case they’re not very comfortable with the idea that they’re the cause of the disaster. One of the points that I’ve been trying to make in recent years is that it’s inaccurate to talk about such things as huge floods as acts of God. There was a time when that language made perfect sense, but sometime in the last 20 or 30 years, human beings as a species have grown large enough that we really do alter the basic climatic patterns on the planet because of our use of fossil fuels.

Warm air holds more water vapor than cold air does. Therefore you get more evaporation, more drought in arid areas and you get more precipitation, more deluge in wet areas. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that 1998, which was the warmest year on record, also saw 3 million human beings, one human being in 20, forced from their homes by flooding. That’s not an act of God; that’s not a natural disaster. That’s at least in part a man-made disaster. And we need to start thinking about them in those ways and taking responsibility for them.

Bill McKibben: I think U.S. energy policy is a complete joke! And I think it’s been a bi-partisan commitment to do nothing about these issues now for a number of years – and it continues.

Bill McKibben: Well, for two reasons. One: There’s an enormous vested interest of energy companies, also fuel industries, in our political system and we see that all the more clearly in the wake of things like Enron or in the wake of the acknowledgment that the Bush administration energy policy was written by the fossil-fuel industry!

And probably even more important is that our political leaders are extremely scared that if they do anything to change our absolute reliance on cheap oil that voters will punish them for it, that people are unwilling to pay a little more for gasoline, or make the other fairly modest changes that would be necessary to jump-start the transition to a sensible and at least semi-sustainable way of life.

Bill McKibben: Drive less. You know, if Americans eliminated one car trip in 14, if they were able to plan ahead sufficiently to go to the grocery store three times a week instead of four, it would overnight reduce our fossil fuel use about 5 percent.

Drive small. We just traded in our old Honda Civic, which got 40 miles to the gallon and got a new Honda Civic hybrid – we actually got the first one in the state of Vermont – two weeks ago. So we’re tooling around now in a car that’s cheap – $20,000, so way below the median price of a new car – and that drives absolutely ordinarily. Nothing in it is odd or unusual. You don’t have to plug it in. It’s just a Honda Civic – the most vanilla car there ever could be, but because it’s got this small engine with an electric battery to assist it, we’re getting about 55 miles to the gallon!

So that’s number two. And number three is engage in the political action necessary to make these changes permanent. The Senate last month, with 19 Democrats going along, voted against the proposal – the modest proposal – to raise average gasoline mileage to 35 miles per gallon by the year 2015! So, you know, way less than the Honda Civic that I traded in to get this new one.

Bill McKibben: Well, the same things apply. I do my best and I’m extremely cognizant of the fact that there’s something extremely odd about flying to parts of the world to urge people to produce less CO2. What can I say? One makes one’s pacts with the devil where one feels one absolutely has to!

But that’s absolutely right. Now in statistical terms, it’s driving that’s the single biggest problem by far. That’s where fuel gets used the most. On the other hand, it’s air travel that often is the most discretionary of all transportations. It’s crazy the way that we all hop on airplanes at the drop of a hat, especially now, when there are emerging good technological alternatives. Like video conferencing and things like that.

Bill McKibben: Yes, and they get tired of being searched like criminals every time they take an airplane now. 9/11 certainly highlighted a lot of these questions for everyone and should have made it clear to us what a stupid idea our very centralized energy system and our deep reliance on cheap oil is for security things as well as everything else. But at some deep level this really should be much more of a moral issue for us than it is. And that’s one of the reasons that we were trying to get clergy so involved. To me the highlight of that SUV protest in Lynn was my friend Dan Smith, who’s the assistant pastor of the church where I grew up, and his big sign that said, "What would Jesus drive?" That was the image that the newspapers fixed on for the most part and rightly so. I mean, there is no more important environmental decision that most people make in the course of a decade. The only other one is how many children should I have? What car you are going to drive is the kind of decision that one needs to pray over.

Bill McKibben: I think that if they’re able to go and get something like a hybrid vehicle that it makes real sense, because not only are you dramatically decreasing your fuel use, you’re also kind of jump-starting these alternative technologies.

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. Bikes and feet. I love being able to ride my bike to work. It’s one of my greatest pleasures at the moment. But we’ve become disembodied as Americans, and that is hard to cure because we’ve set up living situations that make it unfriendly to walk or ride – suburbs, for example, where things are farther away than they should be. But an awful lot of people manage to overcome that anyway and in the process to become slightly less alienated from their bodies as well.

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. And do it in very practical ways with small steps like having church outdoors and for the minister to make sure he’s out on his bike all the time. The town we’re in at the moment is a wonderful town – Middlebury, Vt. – and our local Episcopal pastor, Catherine Nichols, was the first person in town to have one of these hybrid cars. The license plate says "70 mpg" and there she is, in her collar some of the time, driving that around. Well, that’s a powerful witness. There was a big Earth Day celebration on the lawn of her church, too.

Bill McKibben: At the very least, I think everyone should be able to agree that we have enough roads. We don’t need more of them and in fact in all sorts of cases, like old service roads and things, it makes great sense to be retiring roads that we no longer need. And some day we’ll retire a lot of them.

Bill McKibben: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve worked hardest on the things that have the most immediate payoff, because I’ve spent my career worrying about CO2. And we really only have a very, very few decades to dramatically reduce the amount of it that goes into the atmosphere. We’ve already waited far too long to avoid serious damage. Everything I do is predicated at some level on most bang for the buck in terms of results. But I think that people like Jan Lundberg are real visionaries doing absolutely crucial work.

Bill McKibben: Absolutely. It’s so exciting to go places and see places that have managed to pioneer all sorts of new alternatives. I wrote about a city in Brazil once in a book of mine, a book called Hope, Human and Wild. I wrote about a city called Curitiba, south of Brazil. A city of now I think almost four million people. It has the best bus system in the world and it’s just amazing beyond belief what a wonderful transit system it has and as a result, its citizens use about 25 percent less fuel than other Brazilians. That’s a really big number. And it highlights the point that changes in behavior are possible.

If you go to any poor part of the world you realize that when people don’t have the luxury of being able to buy their own huge machine to drive around, then people come up with dozens and dozens of other completely effective ways to move around. And then when you go to other rich parts of the world, like Europe, you realize that with a very little thought people are able to conceive of infinitely more elegant systems than we’ve come up with.

Bill McKibben: They’ve taken these issues more seriously for a longer time. They live in somewhat more concentrated circumstances that make other transit alternatives a little bit easier and they’re not as thoroughly evangelized by the gospel of comfort and convenience above all as we have been.

The kind of complete and utter hyper-individualism that would lead someone to drive by themselves down the highway in a 3-ton SUV hasn’t infected Europe to quite the same degree.

Bill McKibben: There are a lot of people saying this was THE great opportunity. On September 12, the President could have said, "Look we’ve got two jobs. One job is we’ve got to track down this guy bin Laden and the other job is we’ve got to change forever our reliance on fossil fuel."

We could have done it! We still could do it. There’s something pathetic about the sight of people going out and buying SUVs, sticking American flags on them. You might as well stick a Saudi flag on them – that’s who benefits if you’re driving around in one. It doesn’t help us.

Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.