Bill McKibben, climate change writer, educator and organizer, was the keynote speaker of the fifth Norman Maclean Literary Festival.
The average age of the crowd listening to Bill McKibben speak at the Wilma Theater in Missoula over the weekend was probably close to his age - 63. But McKibben grasped that, and took it in a particular direction.
As the keynote speaker for the fifth In the Footsteps of Norman Maclean Literary Festival put on by the Seeley-Swan Valley's Alpine Artisans, McKibben said 70 million Americans are over the age of 60. (In Montana, over 20% of the population is 65 or older.) This demographic "punches above their weight" politically, he said, because they all vote, and have about 70% of the country's financial assets.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, in 2008 with a bunch of college students. Young people advocated against the Keystone Pipeline, for the divestment of universities and institutions from companies that rely on fossil fuels, formed the Sunrise Movement and applauded the Green New Deal.
Young people have done their part, McKibben said, in large part because they're the ones looking down the barrel of the gun.
And yet, McKibben said people in his generation are passing the baton, telling young people it's up to their generation to solve the problem of climate change. More disturbingly, he said, his fellows are telling those younger that they give them hope.
"This is not okay ... because for all their energy and intelligence and idealism, by themselves young people lack the structural power to make change on the scale that we need in the time that we have," McKibben said.
Put another way, if you have hair coming out of your ears, McKibben said it's likely you have structural power coming out of your ears as well. McKibben started his most recent effort, called the Third Act, to organize people over the age of 60 to act on climate and justice.
Much of the rest of his speech focused on the state of the world and its relation to climate change, highlighting that 2023 was the hottest year on record and that 2024 is shaping up to break that record. Floods, storms and fires have become more frequent. McKibben said he thought Norman Maclean's greatest book was Young Men and Fire and its prescience about the fact that fire was going to become a "dominant motif" of our world was a sad truth.
"The most important human task there's even been is not to stop global warming. That's no longer possible," McKibben said. "It is to stop it short of a place where it cuts civilization off at the knees."
The Norman Maclean Literary Festival began in 2015 and has happened every other year since. An extra year was skipped in 2021 due to the covid-19 pandemic.
"It was kind of an outgrowth of our open book club, the interest in authors and literature," Jenny Rohrer, Alpine Artisans program coordinator, said.
The book club used to feature John Maclean, Norman's son, and would get 90 attendees. The interest in the Maclean heritage, of which much stems from Seeley Lake, led to the idea of bringing together other writers that have come in the "footsteps of Maclean."
Other speakers included Liz Carlisle, who writes about ecosystem health and agriculture; Rick Bass, author and activist with a focus on the Yaak ecosystem in northwest Montana; and Lander Busse, one of the youth plaintiffs in the Held v. Montana climate trial, the first of its kind in the country.
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