Play It Green

I’ve been meaning to give them a mention for some time, but I’m slow and easily distracted. I’m talking about 350.org, the new venture in getting people to give a crap about the environment launched by Bill McKibben (he’s the guy who inside the environmental movement is EVERYWHERE–cover blurbing or writing all the books, running or organizing all the latest green ventures. To the point where I had come to assume that McKibben was a household name before asking around and receiving blank stares in response. I really have become seriously and irrevocably immersed in all things green). 

 350.org won my favor immediately by calling E’s office and saying that PlayItGreen had given them a few good leads in terms of athletes they could contact for endorsement. Here’s their deal: they want the number 350 imprinted in as many brains as possible. According to climate guru Dr. James Hansen at NASA, we need to reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million or the world will be irrevocably changed for the worse. (insert screams and doomsday music). This can only be accomplished through real, serious, major overhaul changes–mass support for wind  and solar (and a new smart grid to boot), shutting down coal plants, keeping the rainforests intact.

 Since athletes are akin to gods here on planet Earth, 350.org has thought to enlist their help. Really, the athletes just have to sign a pledge and wear a lime green 350.org wristband and hold up signs where possible (bonus points for signs in cool locations). So far, a lot of winter athletes have lined up in support–not surprising, since they’re the first to notice the effects of global warming. The ultimate goal, of course, is to round up a good 350 of them.

 And the organization is also trying to get 35,000 invites to Obama and McCain (send yours here) to get whoever is elected (Obama. cough.) to go to the U.N. Climate meetings in December and get the country back on track in becoming an environmental world leader.

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I just returned from the illuminating Water of Life conference at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York (see some impressions at the E Mag site here), where the issue was water—how we’ve allowed corporations to pollute and defile it while we looked the other way, and how fast and efficiently we’re going to have to work to protect what’s left. What could have been a depressing experience was made somewhat exciting in the way that an all-or-nothing situation inevitably is. It would be one thing if environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., award-winning biologist Dr. John Todd and funny, rabble-rousing new U.N. water advisor Maude Barlow got up to the podium with the message “We’re doomed. We blew it. And we’ve got no solutions.” But nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve been on a really, really wrong-headed course, yes, and much of the world is in serious water crisis not only from too much use, but also from the privatization of freshwater supplies around the world that are then indiscriminately used as toxic dumping grounds. Regulations have been in short supply under the Bush administration, but the fight for water as a human right is loud and getting louder.

In a discussion that wove through energy policy and American culture and religion and the wilderness, RFK, Jr. mentioned the name of a certain Sports Illustrated writer: Robert H. Boyle, an outdoorsman and contributing editor who’s been writing for them since the 1950s and is still on the masthead. Boyle, a dedicated fly-fisherman and ex-Marine founded the Hudson River-protecting organization Riverkeeper in 1966, together with other blue collar fishermen who decided to challenge the railroad companies and gas and electric companies that were using the river as a dumping ground.

Now, looking into their relationship, it’s perhaps a bittersweet mention on Mr. Kennedy’s part. On June 20, 2000, Boyle and seven members of the Riverkeeper board resigned in an angry split with Kennedy who had brought in a staff scientist, William Wegner. Wegner had spent time in federal prison for smuggling rare birds into the country.

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