In 2009, the international environmental campaign 350.org coordinated 5200 simultaneous rallies and demonstrations in 181 countries in the lead-up to the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen.  

The initiative prompted CNN to conclude that it was the ‘most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history’.  With global leaders failing to reach a mandate on how to implement a workable climate change policy, 350.org is continuing its crusade.  

On October 10, thousands of communities across the globe will come together again to celebrate climate solutions. MiNDFOOD spoke to 350.org founder Bill McKibben to discuss the ongoing campaign.

You sounded an alarm against global warming in your 1989 book ‘The End of 
Nature.’ How much has public opinion changed towards climate change concerns since then?


I fear public opinion hasn't changed nearly as fast as I had assumed it would. For a while the world seemed to be moving towards real action, but in the last decade progress has stalled. This is partly because the United States has refused to take the lead, and partly it's because India and China have emerged as big new users of fossil fuel. All of that has made real progress difficult.


Has the international community improved its environmental polices since 1989?


Yes, in small increments. But unfortunately small increments are not what we need. The physics and chemistry of climate change indicate that we need transformative change at a very rapid pace, more than will be convenient or comfortable for our economies or political systems. So far no leaders have emerged to guide us there.


How do you put some of your environment concerns into practice on a day-to-day basis?


Well, I live in a house that got a prize for being the most efficient in Vermont the year it was built.  I drive a hybrid car and our electricity and hot water are generated by solar energy. But I spend much of my life on airplanes, trying to build this global movement. So all in all I'm a great producer of co2. I hope it's worth it, but sometimes I wonder.


What prompted you to start 350.org?

I felt we needed a movement to fight climate change. It wasn't enough simply to put forward the scientific and economic arguments, we actually needed to push our politicians to act, and the only way to do that was to start assembling a real mass movement.


What was the immediate reaction from the online community?

Fantastic. We had no money, so without Skype, Facebook, blogs and social networking we couldn't have done anything much. Online people understood our message. We need to continue to use these tools to get action in the real world. We can no longer just send each other emails, we must use the web to organise lots of people in lots of far-flung places. We can take the images of those events and bring them back together on the web to make the sum of the actions bigger than their constituent parts.


CNN described the 2009 rally as  'the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.' Did it make any tangible difference in the way US policy makers considered climate change?


To-date it’s had very little impact. Movements take time, which unfortunately we don't have much of. A successful movement can demonstrate to politicians that it can be an electoral force and change public opinion. 



Where did global leaders go wrong in Copenhagen?


They balked. They listened to the fossil fuel industry. Not all of them, though, 117 nations signed up to meet the 350 target. But these nations were the poorest and most vulnerable. The richest and most addicted, principally the US, need a lot more pressure.


Can conferences like Copenhagen ever really make a difference to the way we use and preserve the environment?


They're going to have to, because this is an unavoidably global problem.


In your opinion what is the single most important environmental issue that faces the global community in the next year?


We're not going to get significant action in the next year, not with the US Congress becoming more conservative in the short term. But if the US won't act, the world won't act. So we need to spend the next couple of years building a serious movement, one that is ready to really push when there is a political opening.