Vermont Conversation: Bill McKibben sees a nation at a crossroads as he barnstorms battleground states

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Bill McKibben says that “elections should not be this important.”

They should not “be the deciding factor between continued stability and whatever kind of creeping fascism we’re playing with,” he writes. “And they certainly shouldn’t be determining questions of planetary survival. But they are.”

McKibben, founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over age 60 “to safeguard our climate and democracy,” has been barnstorming the country in recent weeks to get out the vote and his message. He has traveled through battleground states including Pennsylvania, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Iowa and Texas listening to and speaking with residents about what matters to them and why their vote matters to the world.

McKibben says he has encountered a country grappling with economic anxiety, political division and growing concern about the future of democracy.

“We tell ourselves that this is the richest country on Earth,” he told me. “But man, for the most part in this country, there are a lot of people just barely getting by.”

McKibben is the author of some 20 books and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and his Substack, The Crucial Years. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and has won the Gandhi Peace Prize. His latest book is “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.”

In the political swing districts he has visited, McKibben said, frustration over the rising cost of living was nearly universal. Concerns about gas prices, groceries and housing surfaced repeatedly at doorsteps. Yet he also encountered a deeper sentiment among voters.

“People are really hurting, really feeling it,” he said, “and finally starting to understand in a way that I haven’t quite felt before that it’s not their fault that there’s some kind of corruption and collusion at the highest levels of our society that are making it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to manage to live out anything that even resembles the American dream.”

Although the campaign issues varied by region, McKibben said, concerns about President Donald Trump and the direction of the Republican Party were common themes.

In northern New York and Michigan, for example, he said voters were troubled by hostility toward Canada, a critical economic and cultural partner for border communities.

“Everybody apprehends and everybody understands that it’s insane,” McKibben said. “Canada is an ally and has been forever. We have no real beef with them in any way.”

He also expressed concern about the growing influence of wealthy donors in American elections, singling out billionaire Elon Musk’s spending as a sign of a democratic system under strain.

“When you have one man able to spend 15 or 20% of all the money that’s going to get spent in these elections himself, you have the kind of world that is so far from a working democracy that it’s hard to imagine,” he said.

Despite the political turbulence, McKibben, founder of 350.org, remains focused on climate change, the issue that has defined much of his career. Returning to Vermont, he warned that the effects of global warming are already unavoidable and accelerating.

“Let’s be honest: The ship is not going to be entirely righted,” he said. “Climate change is now advanced and advancing much further, even as we speak.”

Still, he argued that technological advances offer reason for optimism. Falling costs for renewable energy, particularly solar and wind power and battery storage, have created opportunities that did not exist a decade ago.

“We now do have the tools: cheap solar, cheap wind, cheap batteries, to finally at least start not stopping global warming — too late for that — but shaving tenths of a degree off how hot the planet eventually gets,” he said.

McKibben described the challenge ahead as “the biggest rescue mission in human history,” noting that even small increases in global temperature affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

At the same time, he said, Americans are increasingly exhausted by the intensity of modern politics.

But amid widespread voter frustration, McKibben said he found hope in the volunteers and activists he met across the country, especially older Americans reconnecting with the activism of their youth.

Many are “hearkening back to their first act, to the days of the civil rights movement and the peace movement and the first Earth Day,” he said.

For McKibben, those grassroots efforts remain the country’s best path forward.

“It is a struggle between democracy and money,” he said. “Not at all clear which side is going to win. But we will do what we can, and we will do it in the best possible spirit that we can.”

Disclosure: Bill McKibben is the husband of writer and journalist Sue Halpern, a board member of the Vermont Journalism Trust, VTDigger’s parent organization.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Bill McKibben sees a nation at a crossroads as he barnstorms battleground states.