Where Art Meets Organizing: Bill McKibben on the Power of Climate Crisis Posters
“Posters are art in service to movement.”
Environmentalists, traditionally, have done a pretty good job of appealing to whichever hemisphere of the human brain enjoys bar graphs and pie charts. And this is important—you have to win the argument. But when it comes to climate change the argument was won thirty years ago: that’s when science reached a strong and workable consensus on the crisis we face and the ways out.
Having won the argument, however, we’ve failed so far to win the fight, and that’s because it’s fought on different grounds—on the ground of money, power, and vested interest, and also on the ground of hope and fear. There is, after all, another side of our brain, one that reacts far more viscerally to the dilemmas we face.
I can say—having helped organize some of the biggest climate demonstrations in world history, and having gone to jail and sent others there, and having campaigned on every continent and in most nations—that art is at this point as necessary as science in the battle for the future. The poster is likely to be the place where art meets organizing, where it lends its hand most powerfully.
Art is at this point as necessary as science in the battle for the future.
I remember arriving at the great campground at Standing Rock that marked the site of one of the most important battles of the last decade, over the Dakota Access Pipeline. Tents and teepees stretched in every direction, but one of the central ones was given over to the equipment for silk screening. The remarkable art that emerged from that canvas-sided structure (“Water is Life”) helped power the fight. Almost by definition, posters are art in service to movement, art whose meaning is intimately connected with the thousands or millions of people willing to stand behind it.
If we manage to make real progress in the climate fight it will be because clever engineers figured out how to produce better, cheaper solar panels. But it will also be because gifted artists, like the ones represented here, poured their skill and passion into art that truly moved the needle.
(Middlebury College, Spring 2022)
IT’S GETTING HOT, Digital, Valeria Andreolli Brentonico, Italy valeriaandreolli.wordpress.com
HABITAT, Digital, Jonathan Cumberland, Northport, AL, USA, jonathancumberland.com
A IS FOR ACTION, Digital photographs of found pieces of garbage, Madeleine Page, Baltimore, MD, USA, www.mpagedesign.com
UPSIDE DOWN, Digital, Kelly Holohan, Elkins Park, PA, USA, holohandesign.com
WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER,Collage of hand-painted papers, colored pencil, oil pastel, Andrea D’Aquino, New York, NY, USA, www.andreadaquino.com
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From Posters for the Planet: Tear, Paste, Protest, published by Princeton Architectural Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.
