350.org

     Bill McKibben uses his organization, 350.org, to provoke global change for the benefit of the environment.  His website is a lot less scholarly-looking than www.treehugger.com because McKibben is more focused on the emotional appeal to audiences than whether his website will be used as a source for peer-reviewed articles.  Nevertheless, 350.org includes a “Science” tab listing fact-based information about global warming trends. 
     In an interview with the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, McKibben describes his shift from being a journalist for the New York Times to becoming a leading activist for the environment.  As McKibben states, “writing alone wasn’t getting the job done fast enough” (par. 6).  After having written The End of Nature and Eaarth, McKibben realized that the environment needed immediate relief and couldn’t wait for the lessons in his books to sink in over time.  His movement, titled 350.org, is responsible for “some 20,000 rallies and demonstrations in every country except North Korea” (par. 3).  This large-scale activism takes advantage of global social media to reach thousands of individuals across the globe. 
     The movement gets its name from the goal to have an atmospheric CO2 concentration at or below 350 ppm (parts-per-million).  Jim Hansen, a scientist who presented his findings to the American Geophysical Union, stated in his paper that a planet such as the Earth cannot sustain life, as it has come to exist, with a CO2 concentration about 350 ppm.  McKibben equates this number to someone’s cholesterol number.  By giving someone a number they should be at, when they are actually at a higher number (390 ppm), there is an incentive to make changes now, before it’s too late; as per McKibben’s example, someone with a cholesterol of 263 would be alarmed when told that the safe range is below 200 and he/she is at risk of having a heart attack or stroke. 
     A sit-in outside of the White House, organized by 350.org, involved 12,000 people and 1,253 arrests; it culminated in president Obama’s rejection of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil to the US from tar sands in Canada.  McKibben justifies the need for immediate and drastic action: “Behavioral changes will come on the same day, too, when there’s a price on carbon.  If we had 100 years, it would make sense to do a slow process of education...for people to suddenly say, ‘Huh, perhaps I don’t actually need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store.’  [Instead,] send everybody in America a check for their share of the pie every month” (par. 32).

Works Cited

"Bill McKibben: Actions Speak Louder than Words." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2012): n. pag.
     Web. 1 Oct. 2012. <http://bos.sagepub.com/content/68/2/1>.