Pass the 'Better,' Please: A Conversation With Bill McKibben

By ABA President Russ Lawrence of Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton, Montana

Bill McKibben

Author Bill McKibben is a thoughtful man, alert to what's going on in the world. He was among the first to write seriously of the consequences of global warming with The End of Nature in 1996, and even then was thinking of what we could do to avert the impending disaster.

Now, in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, to be published in March by Times Books (Henry Holt and Company), he extends and deepens his thinking on the subject. He recognizes that for the last 60 years we have, by all objective measures, been leading ever-more materially abundant lives. In the same time period, however, our subjective happiness has been declining -- peaking in the 1950s according to one poll, and dropping steadily and significantly ever since.

McKibben's writing has always tended more to the prescriptive than the descriptive, and Deep Economy is no exception. How do we fix this mess? He suggests that instead of an economy based on the idea of "more," we begin to move toward one based on "better." Instead of asking "What can we buy?" a better question might be "Is your life good?"

Independent booksellers are, in many cases, people who have already grasped that idea. More than a few booksellers have given up relatively lucrative careers in order to open a store, or deliberately chose this line of work over something more remunerative but less meaningful. We are also frequently out in front when it comes to promoting notions of "community" and supporting local economies, two key concepts in McKibben's book.

As a result, I thought it would be instructive to ask him to expand on some of the ideas in Deep Economy. I hope you appreciate his thoughtful responses as much as I did.

Q: How did this become the topic that you absolutely had to write about next?

A: Everything I've done since The End of Nature is in some way a response to this overriding question of global warming, and how we're going to transform our societies. But I'd begun to suspect that the pull of a more attractive life might be as important as the push of fear. To understand that, I needed to understand the economics of consumption -- which in the end is really a study in psychology and sociology as much as it is economics. Utterly fascinating, as writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Dubner have made clear. But I'm more eager than they are to try and transform, not just understand.

For me, one of the most important parts of my work is to find embers and blow on them: to let people know what good things are starting to happen, and to hope that knowledge serves as a spark to spread such ideas widely enough, and in enough time.

Q: Booksellers have frequently been among the first to "get" the idea of local economies. Why do you think that might be?

A: Bookstores are often one of the gathering places of a community -- booksellers understand that it's more than just the need for stuff that drives their business, it's also the need for community, for human exchange and connection.

Q: Could bookstores do more to counter this trend of becoming ever-more isolated individuals, with ever-fewer ties to our communities?

A: They already are. My sense, as I travel, is that the local stores that are most successful are the ones that have consciously built a community -- through readings, but also through becoming intimately involved with the local economy. (Our bookstore, for instance, sells lots and lots of CDs by local musicians.) It goes beyond the Chamber of Commerce approach, to something even more connected. Like maybe setting up a stall at the farmers market for selling local authors!

Q: What opportunities do you see for redirecting our political and economic priorities -- from "growing the economy" to "growing human satisfaction"?

A: On the one hand, the tide is still running the other way -- Wal-Mart and Amazon and globalization still rule. But I sense that the tide is very nearly as far up the beach as it's going to get. For one thing, the approaching end of the era of the cheap fuel (both because we're running short of oil and because we're finally starting to take global warming seriously) means the economics will change. More important, people are realizing in larger numbers than before how unsatisfying the life of accumulation has become. Economists and sociologists, as I chronicle in the book, are finally generating the data to show what some of us have intuitively known: America's controlled experiment to determine if "more" was actually "better" has yielded a robust, negative result. We're ready for something else.

Q: You cite "eating locally" as a means of building local economies. What other simple actions can people take, right now, to start living in ways that are congruent with your vision of a new economy?

A: There are lots of commodities that can be made and consumed closer to home. Food is the easiest -- and farmers markets are the fastest-growing parts of our food economy. But energy is following, as more and more communities figure out how to build town-scale windmills, or subdivision-size solar panels. And even more ephemeral things too: we've assumed that music, for instance, needs to come from Nashville or Los Angeles. But we're making more and more of it closer to home: the bands that are actually making money are the descendants of the wandering minstrels, engaging people near their homes. We're seeing more and more community-powered radio. And, of course, the Internet offers possibilities both for localization and for linking those local communities to the broader world.

I hope and expect that new experiments in local currency may prove most transforming of all. In the Berkshires, for instance, real banks are now issuing Berk-Shares, good only in western Massachusetts.

Q: How do you become a "local," and why or why not is it important?

A: In my experience, it's easy to become a local: help out. And don't try to tell everyone how to do things. If you're on the local volunteer fire department, or teaching in the local Sunday school, or volunteering in the schools, then you become a local fast. Often, especially in rural communities, people move in trying to "improve" things. Which is sweet, but it's important to remember people have worked out ways to survive over the long haul that are appropriate. And often the mismatch, in rural areas, between the wealth of newcomers and the poverty of locals can be a great divide. It needn't be: if you can let someone teach you how to drive the pumper-truck to a chimney fire on a snowy night, they may listen to your opinions about land-use planning.

Buying local is an important part of this. I spent a whole winter recently eating only out of my valley -- by its close I knew most of the farmers and had a much stronger sense of their struggles and pleasures. Localization is neither liberal nor conservative -- it's something on a different scale. As my friend Tod Murphy, who runs a local-food diner, put it on one of his bumper stickers: Think Globally, Act Neighborly.

Q: How do notions of scale affect the well-being of communities? For instance, a 160,000 square-foot discount store might be an asset in a blighted urban area, but inappropriate in a small, rural community. Are there objective criteria by which issues of appropriate scale might be judged?

A: I think 160,000 square feet of anything is unlikely to be an appropriate scale. But in general, I'm less worried by exact models than by trajectories: Are we headed toward something smaller, more durable, more human? If we are, then we can make the journey at different paces in different places.

Q: How do you manage the stuff-versus-happiness issue in your own life? Do you feel that you, or your family, are deprived in any significant way by your choices?

A: Many years ago, after I wrote a book called The Age of Missing Information, we got rid of the TV. It proved to be the best education we could have hoped for: after it had been gone about three days, we forgot that it had ever existed. We don't feel deprived, I think, when we decide there's something we could do without; in fact, I'm the furthest thing from an ascetic. One reason I eat locally is that I like my dinner to taste like something. You might say that this book is the work of an out-and-out hedonist, determined to get more than my share of pleasure from the world!

Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, including The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

BTW extends thanks to Times Books/Henry Holt and Company for permission to reprint this interview.