I first heard of Bill McKibben over the summer when I was assigned to read his book, The Age of Missing Information, for my honors college class at UVM. After completing the book, I heard the scholar in residence at Middlebury College who was invited to talk to us as a guest speaker for one of our plenary lectures, which are required for first-year honors college students.

 

Instead of talking to us about his book however, he disclosed information about his new endeavors and introduced 350.org.

 

350.org is a website and a movement – a way to spread the word about global climate change and ways to prevent it. After an email interview with McKibben, it became even more evident how important this number is, and why his standpoint is so clear.

 

"If we're not able to curb climate change, we'll see dramatic extensions of the things that are already apparent: the rapid melt of the Arctic, the increased drought and spread of deserts in dry areas and heavier floods in wet ones; the rise of sea levels; and so on," McKibben says. With events like Hurricane Katrina and water scarcity in the Middle East, it's hard to contradict the idea that the world is undergoing massive change, one that most likely won't be for the better.

 

Climate change can seem overwhelming and far off, but its affects will hit close to home -- and some are already starting, such as Vermont's birds having to migrate farther up into the mountains. A local resident, McKibben states that "Vermont has much to lose as the climate changes: our lovely forests, winter, maple syrup season -- but we're also part of a larger world that will increasingly be untenable and chaotic."

 

This concept should unite all of us not only in our local communities, but worldwide in an effort to stop global warming and bring us down to 350 parts per million of CO2. "We're trying to do the same thing for the world" writes McKibben, by "spread[ing] the news that scientists now believe that 350 parts per million CO2 is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere."

 

So what can we do? Helping to spread the word is just a start. McKibben contributes his ideas on informing others, stating "on October 24th, we need people all around the world participating in cool actions to spread the word -- if you go to 350.org its easy to sign up. In the meantime we need people using their email address books to spread the word to folks around the world."

 

So sign up! Plan something that will introduce to others what I am now imparting to you. Even Bill McKibben started with spreading the word through a "movement really [starting] with a big march across Vermont in September of 2006" and the follow-up with their first site, stepitup07.org. If we all work together, someone will hear, someone will listen. With that, below is the video McKibben showed my class in the lecture, and just remember:

 

"350 is the most important number in the world, and we want to make it the most well known" -- Bill McKibben. 

 

top photo: Cristian Boldisteanu/Flickr    side photo: Step It Up 2007/Flickr