 Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, the Edward W. Cain Executive Director at the Concord Museum. And I thank all of you who have joined us for tonight's virtual conversation with Bill McKibben. It's a pleasure and privilege for me to introduce Laurie Patton, President of Middlebury College and one of the co-sponsors of tonight's event, President Patton. Good evening, everyone. It's really delightful to be here. Thank you so much, Tom. And I want to congratulate you on what is, I guess, your last official program and on your retirement. This is a wonderful moment for you to end your career with my friend Bill. I think I would want to begin by saying that there are very few people for whom I would emerge out of the main woods. And Bill is one of them. And I'm going to tell you why in a second. You probably already know a lot about Bill McKibben. It's why you're here. You know he's the author of one of the first major books on climate change, The End of Nature, many years ago in 88. And you also probably know that he's the founder with students of 350.org, one of the most influential environmental activist groups in the world. And you know that he has written about sustainability in our planet, not only in terms of the environment but also about the economy and trying to build an economy that is not dependent on infinite growth in order to be understood as healthy. You may not know that he has written on solo hikes between Vermont and New York, that he will be just publishing or has just published a children's book. We are better together. And you may also not know that he is a beloved teacher in addition to a beloved activist and author. Students flock to his courses and they become changed. The reasons why I emerged out of the main woods, however, are different than any of those reasons. They are embedded in some of the things that I hope you all will talk about tonight. Bill and I are the same age. We watched America in the 70s and 80s as adolescents and age when as Eric Erickson has argued, all people are philosophers. I often visited Lexington where my grandmother and grandfather lived on Wachuset Drive in the final years of their life. And I would visit the monuments and field and historical homes of Lexington and conquered with awe. I duplicated the daily schedule of the Alcott home and I probably passed Bill at some point when he was giving tour guides to people. We also share an alma mater of Harvard and we watched as undergraduates when Reagan became elected. Bill has gone on to become a major public intellectual and voice for change, taking risks of both working within a system and working outside a system. And as a result, I think there are three things that I will tell you about Bill that you might not have thought about. First of all, he's an educator par excellence. Even when he writes about other topics which is most of the time, he is also writing about education and educating. He understands accessibility and the need for people to wrap their heads around a problem so they can begin to act. And second, as an educator, he understands intergenerational communication and the central role that it must play in American healing. That's why he created the third act, an environmental activist group for older citizens which I hope you will join. He understands both the challenges and the possibilities between generations and he is unfazed by the critiques of the younger generation. We in fact had a student at Middlebury who was quite clear that Bill was way too conservative and establishment identified. And he changed this student in working with him with total trust and openness. A final story, I will credit Bill with the fact that when we were voting on our energy 2028 energy plan which includes being 100% powered by fuel, renewable fuel by 2028, I got very annoyed with our students who were demonstrating yet again when our trustees were already ready to vote. I said, very annoyed. You should be writing the trustees thank you notes, not demonstrating yet again. They're already working with us. The next day, a large bag of thank you notes appeared at the doorway. And I sure Bill didn't give that direct order but I credit him with creating the spirit in which the students began to listen. Our energy 2028 plan was ratified unanimously. Finally, Bill understands institutions and their possibilities as well as their flaws. That's why in his work on climate change he has really pushed so hard to analyze which institutions to support and to believe in and which institutions to resist. He is a pragmatist in the most sacred sense of the word. He works with political parties. He creates social movements that can be joined by anyone. Finally, Bill is graced with a wry sense of humor that gives him great power in the public square. It's not just a deep religious faith that he holds lightly but also accompanied by a wonderful capacity for laughter and ironic wit. He understands the sacredness of human effort as well as its limitations. Bill carries the heaviest things lightly so that he can continue to build community and by building community, build hope, the oxygen we all need. I give you my friend and colleague, Bill McKibben. Larry, thanks for a lovely, lovely introduction. Let me just add a couple more words and then we want to hear from you, Bill, of course. So as Larry mentioned, this is my last forum before I retire. There's a bit of symmetry for after organizing hundreds of forums like this here in Concord and at the Kennedy Library, which is part of the National Archives and Records Administration. The symmetry when I began my professional career 32 years ago, one of the first books that I read was The End of Nature and I have kept it on my bookshelf ever since. And then when I began my work at the Concord Museum, of course, not only did I reread Walden, but I read the edition in which you write such a lovely introduction in which you write, at the close of the 20th century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist volume and to search for Thoreau's heirs among those trying to change our relationship with the planet. So let me echo what Larry stated, which is few have done more than you to educate us of climate change and to inspire citizen activism. You truly are one of the real spiritual heirs of Henry David Thoreau. And now I will add to my collection this wonderful new book, which I heartily recommend to our audience, The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon. And so I wanna thank you for taking the time to be with us tonight for these wonderful books and your essays that have discomforted all of us through the years and especially for joining us this evening and let me once again thank the co-sponsors of tonight's program, the National Archives and Records Administration, which is hosting it, the Boston Globe, Mass Humanities and Middlebury College. And I know I joined with Bill in thanking President Patton for that wonderful introduction. So Bill, set the stage for us. You weren't born in Massachusetts. What brought your family to live in Lexington and tell us how you came in your words to cheerfully lead tours on the site of that famous first battle in your muted bill. Tom, I certainly shall do just that. Let me just first say many thanks to you for having hosting me tonight and congratulations on transitions in your life. We at Third Act hardly recognize the word retirement because we recognize that the minute that you have some free time, we have chores with which to fill it. So welcome to this next act. Laurie, thank you enormously for that kind introduction. It is an extraordinary pleasure to get to work with and under someone that I admire and adore as much as I do the president of Middlebury College. Middlebury has become a remarkable institution. There are really great things going on there and Laurie is the reason for them. And third of all, let me just say hello to people particularly in Concord, a place where I spent a lot of time and I know it's a good week in Concord because I've already heard from my dear friend, Jesse Parris Smith and colleague who's performing there this week and then giving the Thoreau Society, giving a big award to Jane Goodall later in the week. So as always, much happening there. We arrived in Middlesex County when I was 10. I'd been born in California but then I went to elementary school in Canada, in Toronto. My father was a journalist and he at that time was working for Business Week Magazine and he was their Canadian bureau chief and then came down to cover all the important events beginning to happen around 128 and the sort of birth of the computer industry and so on and so forth. So we arrived in Lexington in 1970 at the height of the kind of pilgrimage to the American suburb, 80% of the growth in America since the war had come in places like Lexington and Concord and they were very much on the ascendant. We bought a house on Middle Street. Couldn't be more middle American than that. Halfway down Middle Street which is right near the Lincoln line over by the old res for people who know Lexington and we bought it, my parents bought it for $30,000. It looks like a, it looked like a child's drawing of a home, a door and a big window in the living room and then upstairs a window for my brother's bedroom and a window for mine overlooking the maple tree which dropped its leaves on the maroon Plymouth that sat in the driveway to carry my father on his commute into Boston. And it was quite idyllic, a kind of modest paradise that I think I assumed at the time would sort of be the norm for the country and perhaps the world. But of course Lexington and Concord were also distinguished by their interesting history that made them a little more than just another bedroom community. And indeed before too long I was giving tours on Lexington Green and my tricorn hat to busloads of tourists that would arrive and I would have two functions. One was to tell them the story of the Battle of Lexington and the other was to direct them onto Concord Bridge where they were all headed next. So those were my summers for a few years. So in a recent New Yorker article you write about what you call the second and third revolutions in Lexington that you experienced in the 1970s. So let's take them one at a time. The first one actually has a Therovian twist since it involves civil disobedience taken by many including your father and many of his neighbors. Tell us that story. Yeah, in fact I believe remains the largest civil disobedience action in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This would have been 1971 at the height of the protests about the Vietnam War. And a group called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the VVAW led by a charismatic, lanky, handsome and quite young recently returned Lieutenant John Kerry were staging a protest and they were doing it. They were reversing Revere's ride. So they started in Concord and spent the night there and then wanted to spend the night on Lexington Green before marching on to Boston. Now I think things, I don't know how they managed to get permission to spend the night in Concord but they did Lexington's town fathers were less interested in this and told them that they could not spend the night on the green and called the police on them. And so when the police arrived several hundred towns people showed up with them to stand with them to be arrested with them to spend the night at the DPW garage. My father, mild-mannered business reporter was among them very out of character for him which is one of the reasons that this whole episode stuck in my mind so heavily. But the other reason I think was that it exemplified what to my 10 or 11 year old brain seemed to be what was happening in America that we were in a conscious fight to make the world a better place and that despite problems, despite assassinations and turmoil and things, we were headed in the right direction. It seemed of a piece with the apex of the civil rights movement with the first Earth Day the year before with the decision in those years that we were going to take women seriously as full parts of society on and on and on. And to me, this moment, really one of my first kind of public memories of the world as opposed to the private memories of one's family and one's life, stuck very hard. And I have no doubt that it contributed in certain ways to the course of my life and the fact that I spent it, well, doing things not unlike what John Kerry was doing then. And frankly, ending up in jail a great many more times than I would have anticipated. And it was a remarkable occasion. But as you point out, not the only thing that happened that year. A quick footnote, the reason they were able to stay and conquered was they stayed near the bridge and it was a national park land. So they got the permit from the national park. So the other example, the other revolution that you witnessed and also involves citizen activism but in your view for less worthy purposes, tell us that story. So I didn't really know this story at all until I started working on this book. And I was doing a lot of research in the archives of the Lexington Minuteman to learn more about that day on the battleground. And it transpired that six weeks apart from that, there was another huge story in Lexington. You know, Lexington, like conquered, like most places, was affluent, although nowhere near as affluent as they are now, and pretty white. And those two things were connected. And Lexington had, you know, in the throes of the civil rights movement had welcomed Martin Luther King to speak and so on and formed something with the grand name of the Suburban Responsibility Commission. And the Suburban Responsibility Commission decided correctly that the responsibility it needed to take on was to give other people some opportunity of living in Lexington. And so they began proposing affordable housing on a fairly modest scale. In 1970, or 71, the plan was for the first real affordable housing complex in the town which would have been about a hundred units. And so the Suburban Responsibility Commission backed it and so did all the other players in town, all the planning commission and all the ministers of the church and so on. Lexington has a representative town meeting and town meeting passed it by a large margin. And that would normally have been the end of it, but some citizens petitioned to hold the referendum. And so a referendum was held. And this plan that in public had been approved by everybody in the privacy of the voting booth went down to defeat two to one. As the Minuteman opined the next week, it's very clear that if there needs to be affordable housing here, we have to come at it very cautiously and very slow, which I think defines exactly people have come at it in the decade since. Looking back on it, reading that, I think I understand now more than I did as a boy that at the very least that represented the other side of the personality of a town like Lexington. There was a strong liberal streak that wanted to improve the world. And there also was a strong conservative streak, scared of change, not wanting to upset the, well, among other things, the property values that were coming to define this place. And one of the theses of the book time is that the 1970s, the tension between these things plays out until by the end of the decade, we make a pretty decisive choice, electing Ronald Reagan and moving profoundly in one of those two directions. But I think that it was very important for me to see that the seeds of that kind of selfishness were there right at the beginning of that decade too. Just note that the books meticulously researched and as a representative tonight of the National Archives whose mission is to preserve and provide access to the records of our nation from the Declaration of Independence to the records of many of our 20th and 21st century presidents. You can see the value of the oral history project that happened in Lexington and the archives of the local newspaper. But let's move quickly as the title suggests the books divided into three sections, the flag of the cross and the station wagon. I thought we'd take each one one at a time and have you say what it symbolizes and then very broad strokes describe what happened over the past 50 years in each area. And then before we go to questions from the audience I'll ask you about your recommendations about what needs to be done in those three areas. So tell us what you mean by the flag and since tonight's event is being sponsored by the Concord Museum where we have an entire floor of our new permanent galleries devoted to the events of April 19th, 1775 including displaying one of the lanterns hung in the North church at the direction of Paul Revere. And we also have the clock from Buckman Tavern that was ticking and visitors can hear ticking in the same way the local militia and Minutemen heard it after Revere arrived at midnight and were waiting for the British regulars to arrive. Anyway, tell us what you mean by the flag and then perhaps tell us the story of Mark Codman. Well, because of the history of Lexington, one of the things that I really wanted to write about in this book was American history and our sense of it and how it's changed over time. I mean, my scout troop raised the flag over the battle green on the morning of the bicentennial. So I was very bought into this idea of, and still am in many ways, of the importance and the valor of what happened in Lexington and Concord. And I think, again, it had explained a lot of how I spent my life. This was the first looked at in one way, the first battle against imperialism and colonialism that we have around the world in that quite that way. And among other things, it's taught me never to think that there's a conflict between patriotism and dissent, just the opposite. That said, we've learned a lot about American history over the last 50 years and come to think of it in new ways. And one of the things that, to sort of summarize, to give an example that really kind of summarizes that for me, when I was researching, when I was back thinking about the Battle of Lexington, I went and read Revere's account of his ride which he publishes 20 years after the fact, but it becomes the document that Longfellow uses to write the iconic poem as iconic a piece of American literature as there is, you know? And in it, just in, there's a description, just in passing, Revere describing his ride, he says, I set off in a very good horse. It was then about 11 o'clock and very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown neck and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on horseback under a tree. When I got near them, I discovered there were British officers, one tried to get ahead of me and the other to take me. He gallops away, makes his escape. The part that I'd never noticed before was that a positive where he says nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains. I had no idea what that meant. And when I went to research it, it really wasn't easy to find. It hasn't been much written about or described, but the story turns out to be remarkable. 20 years before the revolution, there was a slave in Boston named Mark Codman. He had a particularly brutal master and he poisoned this master in hopes of getting one who wasn't quite so brutal. He was caught, charged not with murder, but with high treason. Having been drawn in quarter, his body was then placed in an iron cage, a gibbet, and hung above Charlestown Common where it stayed for at least the next 40 years, I guess, in an effort to remind people not to be insubordinate to their masters. And obviously such a landmark that Revere could take it on faith that everybody who read his account would know exactly where he meant. When you've read that, it's a little, it casts the Sons of Liberty in a slightly different light and makes you think a little harder about what Massachusetts history meant. And in this book, it served as a real prelude for a chance to talk about how we've dealt with race ever since and what it means in terms of our need to make reparations at this point and what that looks like and how that fits into the story of suburbia, especially the really white parts of it. We'll stay on the topic of race and I'm gonna quote from the book although it's a lovely quote from Martin Luther King. So Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Lexington in 1963. Just a few months, there were 1200 citizens who gathered in the high school gym. He said, we have a long way to go but we're marching towards freedom. And then five months later, you write how during the famous march on Washington, he introduced the concept of a promissory note to which quote, every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. He went on to say, it's obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note and so far as for citizens of color or concern, instead of honoring the sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds but we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, the check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. So in this section about the flag, you really talk quite a bit about race. Maybe give you another moment to talk about that. So when Dr. King was making those remarks, he was using this idea of a promissory note in 1963 as a kind of metaphor for justice, for voting rights, for full participation in American society. By the end of his life in 1968, his analysis had gotten much more economic and much deeper. And now I think he was thinking about that promissory note as a very real sum of money that needed to be provided to people. And you can get a sense of what that's meant then and since by thinking about, well, in this case, a town like Lexington. I told you that my parents bought that house on Middle Street for $30,000. That would be $200,000 in today's money. When it was sold last, which was last year, it went for a million dollars. So that $800,000 was basically the reward you got for being on the escalator at the right time and being able to get on the escalator. And in 1968, there were lots and lots of people who because of their color of their skin either couldn't in many parts of the country move into places or in places like Lexington for historical reasons lacked the funds to put down that 30 grand and get on the escalator at the bottom. And that's one of the reasons that extraordinary growth in suburban land value is that the wealth gap has widened between black and white Americans since King's day. And I mean, the good news is that we're a very wealthy country and have some of the wherewithal to pay, some figure out some ways to pay that debt and some of the other debts that we've incurred too that I think we'll get to as we go along here. So, and again, I heartily recommend the book, which is as far more depth and nuance than our short conversation where this is kind of a teaser hoping that you will read the book and we remind you I hope there'll be some time at the end for your question. So feel free to use the chat feature although Bill and I could go on for the rest of the time. I'm sure. So let's move to the cross. And in this section, you suggest that decline in the number of Americans who regularly attend church is perhaps the biggest seismic societal shift in our nation with the exception, perhaps of the rise of the use of social media. And one might suggest those two are interrelated but tell us more about your section about the cross. Well, I think it's hard now for people to remember younger people but really almost anyone to remember what the religious landscape looked like in, say, 1970. At that point, about 52% of Americans belong to one of the mainline Protestant denominations. They were congregationalist, presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, American Baptist. That's numbers now about 15% of the population. And if you go to the Methodist church like I do, you know there's days when I walk in the door and lower the average age. So it's, you know, that shift has been very dramatic. And more to the point, I think what I write about some, what's happened in American Christianity is that that kind of mainline, more or less, liberal denominations that were, for all their flaws, and there were many, were involved in the project of building a better society, saw themselves as, saw that as part of their mission, what King called the beloved community. That was replaced to the extent that it was replaced by anything, by an evangelical Christianity, which had a very transactional one-on-one personal relationship with, you know, one's God and savior, salvation as the end goal. And as I say in the book, that mirrored our kind of political transition too, when it happened over the same period of time and involved many of the same people. I mean, you know, when we elected Ronald Reagan, what we were basically doing was choosing a world where individuals mattered more than the collective, than the common good, as his pal, Margaret Thatcher explained. There is no, there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. And that's the world that we've been living with politically, but also in many ways, religiously, since. And I think it's done an extraordinary amount of damage to the physical world, but also to our kind of spiritual, cultural, moral sphere that we inhabit. And Leslie, perhaps the most powerful section, relates again to your first book, The End of Nature. It's represented by the station wagon. Tell us more about the growth of American prosperity and its darker aftermath. Well, I mean, let's just talk about the station wagon because in my day growing up in Lexington, everyone had one, you know, Buick Riviera and a state wagon, a country squire. We have the Terino Squire. There you go. We used to, our neighbors next door, the Silvermans would pile us all in the back of their station wagon and head off on a weekend to Buttricks, the late lamented Buttricks ice cream stand down the road and conquered. And when I say pile us in the back, I mean, they would toss all the kids in the back. And if memory serves, on the very back roads, Mr. Silverman would lower the tailgate and we'd dangle our legs over the back as we drove along, all of which would get you, you know, arrested for child endangerment now. But in those days, we took entirely for granted and we entirely enjoyed the car defined, the American suburb, it was a, the suburb was a creature of the car in many ways. And the car defined American life in those years, in the years since, you know, when World War II ended, there were about 25 million cars on the road. By 1970, that number had about quintupled. We'd built the interstate highway system, you know, and America was using one third of the world's energy. The 4% of us who live here were using 33% of the world's energy, mostly because of the car and the suburb that it created. Our project since the end of the Second World War had been building bigger houses farther apart from each other. That was the great American economic engine. And in some ways remains it. And so that had many consequences, some of them social and so on. If you, you know, if you live in bigger houses farther apart from each other, you run into each other less. The average American by 1980 had half as many close friends as the average American of the 1950s, which is a big change for a socially evolved primate. But it also had extraordinary physical consequences. That puff of carbon that came from the American automobile explosion remains the single biggest contributor to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now warming the planet. Even the industrialization of China is smaller than that was. And so when we talk about climate change, there's nothing abstract about it. It came from us over those decades. And of course, as time went on, the station wagon became a quaint relic. Everybody purchased semi military vehicles in order to, I mean, if you go to the parking lot of the stop and shop in Lexington, if you were just landed there as an alien or something, you would assume that there were vast, raging whitewater rivers in Lexington that you had to somehow forward in order to make your way to the grocery. And the same with the houses, they've gotten steadily bigger and filled with steadily more stuff, having paid a million dollars for the house on Middle Street where my parents lived, whoever bought it immediately tore it down and built as big a thing as they possibly could on that footprint. Now it looks not like a child's drawing of a house. It looks like a cross between the junior high school and a medium security prison, you know? And so the debt that we ran up in those years is the debt that now comes due. Climate change as it goes after the people who did the least to cause it, Africa, which has been hit hardest by the rapid rise in temperature, the entire continent produced 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere compared with the 4% of us in America who produced 25% of all those CO2 emissions. We owe the rest of the world a serious debt, part of which we can repay by changing our own habits and ways of life and energy sources and part of which we can repay by literally paying for the damage that's being done around the world. And we need to, and it's one of the things that we're working on hard within the climate movement and at third act. I wanna get to partisan, but some interesting passages about Jimmy Carter and kind of the speeches, the kind of message he was trying to give to the country. And then you also quote President Obama after he leaves office. Maybe you can comment on those two individuals. It's very hard for us now to remember what Carter sounded like because no president before or since has ever sounded anything like it. Let's see. In his first address as president, Carter said, we've learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits. As the energy crisis came on in the 70s, he said, it's a reminder that ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. All the legislation in the world can't fix what is wrong with America, he said. Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. We should change. We should learn that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. That piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. Jimmy Carter went into that 1980 election, pledging that he would, among other things, devote funds to make sure that 20% of the power in America came from solar energy by the year 2000. If that had ever happened, we would be in an entirely different place dealing with the existential crisis of climate change, which we didn't even know about in Carter's day. Instead, of course, Ronald Reagan took over, climbed up on the White House roof, took down the solar power of several panels that Jimmy Carter had put there and set us on an entirely different course. Reagan's presumption was that markets solved all problems. His favorite laugh line for decades in his speeches was, the nine scariest words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Ha, ha, ha. I mean, it turns out that the scariest words in the English language are things like, we've run out of ventilators or the hillside behind your house just caught on fire, which are not things that one solves by oneself. They're things that require a working government in order to, government being another word for all of us working together towards our common destiny in order to solve. But as Obama, you're right, said just a couple of years ago in an interview, someone said, how come you got so little done when you had 60 senators there in your first term? He said, we were still operating within the constraints imposed by Reagan and his election. We tried to take those Jimmy Carter era solar panels back to the Obama White House, return them. So I found them up in Maine, at Unity College, deep in rural Maine, and we tried to take them back and return them. We drove them all the way to Washington and the Obama administration wanted nothing to do with them at all because they were so scared of the kind of taint of Jimmy Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan that they wanted to keep him at a far distance. Okay, so let's turn a little bit to solutions. In terms of the flag, you were just not to be afraid to celebrate all the good things about our nation's history, but not also to be afraid to confront and accept some of our, to use a Judeo-Christian metaphor, original sin. So what do you suggest? How do we approach our history? Well, let me say first that I think that progressives of whom I am one have made a mistake in seeding the flag entirely to the right because I don't think it belongs to them. There's much in the American story that remains incredibly important and liberating. Those men and women in Concord and Lexington, we're standing up for the proposition that kings don't get the right to rule us, that we have the ability to determine our own lives. That was a revolutionary idea then, the first time it had been enunciated in quite that way on this planet. And so it's a truly important, but you can't understand it or celebrate it absent the understanding that they didn't mean it for everyone and that we desperately need to make good what they didn't make good in those days or else that those boasts are empty. It sounds odd to say, and but I think it's one of the great gifts that the 1619 project and other recent historiography has given us the opportunity to say, if we want to celebrate American history, then we need to make American history right. And we can actually change what that history means. If we simply stop now and leave America the unequal place that it is, then it turns out that the things that our forefathers said were not anywhere near as grand as we once thought. But if we take the steps now to make this country an more equal and fairer place, then it will be a sign that the path on which they set us 250 years ago now was a sound and righteous one. But it's up to us to make that history work one way or another. So talking about the cross, I often joke that I'm a proud Harvard Divinity School dropout. I only lasted a year before realizing I was ill-suited for a career in the ministry. But like you as an undergraduate, I was fortunate to get to know and in my case, take a class from Reverend Peter Gomes. So tell us a little bit about how you got to know Reverend Gomes and why he's a model for you in terms of how religious organizations can serve as counter-cultural institutions as we seek a way forward for our nation and our global community. I hope there are some people in the audience who can remember Peter Gomes, one of the great and interesting figures. He was, in many ways, the absolute heir to that mainline tradition that I was describing as Americanist could be born in Plymouth, a member of the Mayflower Club, an Anglo-phile in many ways, a great preacher for decades at Memorial Church in Harvard, which was one of the original churches of American Protestantism. He was conservative in many ways early on in his life. He preached at Ronald Reagan's inaugural, gave the prayer. Also African-American. Yes, also black. But sometime in the 1990s, at the height of the, and always as just spectacular preacher, as great of his class on homiletics at the Divinity School was famous and for good reason. In the 1990s, Harvard had a conservative, funded by the right wing and the big foundations, a conservative newspaper like most college campuses, and they published a special edition attacking gay people at great length, including a long disquisition on why it was biblically unsound to be homosexual. And the next day there was a protest as there always was in Harvard yard about this kind of thing, but it was a fairly desultory affair, a couple of hundred students, they're protesting this ugly, an unkind thing that had been published. And then all of a sudden, Peter Gohm's descended from the steps of Memorial Church, took the bullhorn and said, I know that this explication of Christianity as a hateful attack on gay people is wrong and I know it because I am a theologian and I know it because I am a gay Christian. Which point everybody just paused and kind of gasped and then began to cheer because the absolute embodiment of that kind of Harvard Puritan tradition had outed himself and in the process done a very good thing. He went on to write importantly about what the biblical scriptural references to homosexuality really meant, but he also it freed him in my opinion since I'd known him for many years to become a extraordinary theologian. And if I could get people to read any book on Christianity, it would be his final book, The Standulist Gospel of Jesus, which really lays out the remarkable, radical nature of the gospels and reminds us why it's been as silly for progressives to surrender the Bible as it has to surrender the flag to the right wing. I mean, you know, this is a document, a founding document of our culture in which we're told to take what we have and give it to the poor to turn the other cheek when violently attacked. It's hard to imagine a more radical document in the world. And so Gomes really captures I think what's possible maybe only possible now that that Protestantism has been dethroned as the kind of national religion and as the opportunity to be a more counter cultural, smaller, but perhaps more potent force. And I will note that in the last few years, the statisticians tell us that these denominations that I've been describing are making a very modest comeback and the numbers of people worshiping in those congregations has begun to grow even as the number of evangelicals has begun to shrink. I don't think that we're ever gonna go back to anything like the religiosity of my youth, nor do I think we necessarily should. But I do think that it's a reminder that these can be deeply, deeply potent forces. So I suppose the most powerful section of the book is your prescription for what needs to be done to confront climate change and global warming. So you suggest each of us has three basic alternatives. Can you spell those out for us and why you think the third is the one we should all follow? I suppose one of them is to pretend that there's no problem and which is getting very hard to do on this planet. The second is to work hard to make our own communities a better place. And that's a good thing. And that's really what people in places like Lexington and Concord have done over the years. And I know that there's been a lot of good work around global warming in both those communities in recent times. But we're not going to solve this crisis one Tesla at a time or even one town at a time. We also need, and this is the third part for people to become very politically engaged because if we're going to solve the climate crisis in the time that physics allows us, it's going to mean breaking the political power of the fossil fuel industry one way or another. That's why what Lori Patton and Middlebury did when they divested from fossil fuels was so important and such credit to her for making that happen. It was a leadership move that went on to inspire colleges around the Northeast to do the same. Harvard even eventually finally came on board we're now at about $40 trillion in endowments and portfolios that have divested from fossil fuel. And now we're trying hard to take on the banks and things that are continuing to fund the fossil fuel industry. Let me say that because of the kind of my personal story in this book, one of the outgrowths of it really in the thinking in it was this new organization we've started that's growing very fast called Third Act for progressive organizing for people over the age of 60. And the reason that I did it above all was because as I've been organizing all these years it's mostly been with the young people. We formed 350.org with seven Middlebury students, the kids who did all this divestment work on college campuses went on to found the sunrise movement that brought us the Green New Deal and in its boiled down form, this build back better build that's now finally in the move again in the Senate. You know about Greta Thunberg who you should, she's one of my favorite people in the world to work with and there are 10,000 Greta's and they have 10 million young followers around the planet. That's how many kids were out on school strike and whatever. But I began to get worried at some point Tom that I'd hear people say, well, this is just up to the next generation to solve that we were sort of taking the most difficult problem the planet's ever faced and just handing it off to 17 year olds to deal with. Like, you know, in between Spanish homework and field hockey practice, would you mind also saving the world, you know? And it's a, it's, that's both ignoble and impractical because for all their energy and ambition and earnestness and idealism, those young people lack the structural power to make change of the kind that we need. People over the age of 60, there are 70 million of us in this country that's bigger than the population of France. We vote like crazy. There's no known way to stop old people from voting. So we punch way above our weight politically and we ended up with all the money. About 70% of the financial assets belonged to the boomers or the silent generation above them compared with about 5% for millennials. So if we're gonna pressure Washington or Wall Street, both of which I would like to do, then we need older people engaged. And the good news is that they're becoming engaged more and more and more. It's been extraordinary six months watching this happen. And the best part of it has been working, as Lori said, cross-generationally. Understanding that there's, we don't wanna set the terms of this, we wanna back up the young people who are really providing leadership in the climate movement and the new civil rights movement and all these movements. And what fun that is to watch it happen. We were outside, we had big demonstration outside one of the outside Chase Bank, the single biggest funder to the fossil fuel industry the other day. And there were a bunch of high school kids on hand. This was up in Vermont. And the high school kids were a little spryer. So they were at the front of the march, but at the back of the march, there were a whole big gaggle of people with hairlines like mine marching under a banner that said, fossils against fossil fuels, you know? So that's the kind of spirit it's gonna take if we're going to make change on the scale we need in the time we have. Before we go to the questions from the audience. And again, we welcome you to ask questions through the chat. I wanted to ask a final question. It's possibly a counter-cultural and that may cause me to lose favor with some of my concrete constituency. But we hold Emerson and Thoreau up as icons as non-conformity. Concord's own Bob Gross opens his new book, The Transcendentalist and their world with these words, quote, American individualism founded strongest voices in the transcendentalist and none more so than Ralph Waldo. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson urges contemporaries to trust thyself, seek inspiration in nature and not organize religion and to realize your infinite potential. And Thoreau, of course, shows to live deliberately, to front the essential facts of life and to march to the beat of his own drummer. So should we not hold them somewhat responsible for this hyperindividualism that you've diagnosed as central to the potential of ruining our planet? And much as you suggest we do with our national history, how do we hold on to all that is wise and good and Emerson and Thoreau is teaching while not allowing that individualism to be our undoing? Very good questions. I, Thoreau is a great hero of mine, even more than Emerson. And I did get to write an edition of Walden. So I spent a year inside his peculiar brain and enjoyed it immensely. For all his virtues, Thoreau is also an example of an American archetype in other ways. I mean, he was terrible at getting along with other people. It's fanciful to imagine him with a wife or kids, for instance. And his move out to a house by himself far away from other people, kind of prefigures, doesn't it? The American obsession with moving to big suburban houses out of sight of your next door neighbor. So that's why it's been really important, say, for American environmentalism that Thoreau over the years was tempered by figures like Aldo Leopold or Wendell Berry or Rachel Carson, who recognized the importance of community as an antidote to... So it's not that individualism is a problem, it's one of the glories of, among other things, American history. It's that when individualism is allowed to overwhelm everything else, when it blots out community, when we can no longer imagine ourselves and the bonds that bind us together as being important, when it becomes hard for us to imagine, say, wearing a mask when we go to the supermarket because it's too much of an imposition on our freedom, that one understands that things have gone further than they should. And so I guess the answer is it's a very good idea to revere Thoreau or Emerson, but not to the exclusion of other ideas about how to live in this world. The good news is there's no danger, none at all, that America will abandon individualism. That's not one of the threats, it's deep within our culture and our economy. The danger is that we'll take it too far into the kind of libertarian extreme. And the good news about Thoreau in particular and Emerson was that they did recognize some much larger world for which they had to take responsibility. Hence Thoreau's incredibly important and underlooked role in inventing this thing we now call or that he called civil disobedience. And it was Tolstoy reading Thoreau and then Gandhi reading Tolstoy that really helped birth this incredible new tool for the powerless to stand up for the powerful. And so thank heaven for it, at least as important an invention out of Concord as the stand against colonialism and imperialism that the Minutemen made. So we're running low on time, we have two questions from the audience. The first one is, in your research, did you discover is there any memorial or plaque where Martin Codman was hung or? Mark Codman, I haven't been there to Charlestown, common to see, but I believe there is now. And his story is starting to be a little better known and told, I'm happy to say. And I'll add that the other story that's really important from a Lexington point of view is the story of a man named Prince Esterbrook, slave who was on the battlefield in Lexington and in fact wounded. And that story has been told as well as it can be by the historian and local writer Alice Ingle. And I think now probably that story of Prince Esterbrook features in some of the work that the National Park Service does at the Minutemen National Park. As well as the Lexington Historical Society and he's also part of our exhibit as well. This is an interesting question. Are you perhaps prone to being a little too nice, i.e. where is the place for righteousness and necessary anger? How do we direct our anger effectively in these battles? Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I've spent the last few decades railing as hard as I can against the forces that I think are the problem here. And in return, having them rail back against me, we did, I take it, I guess, as a kind of badge of honor that the fossil fuel industry decided that I was dangerous enough that some years ago, they announced that they were hiring the biggest opposition research firm in the country to, this guy said that we're mounting a campaign that we've only done before with presidential candidates. And every time I stepped out my door for a long time, there were people following me with cameras and videoing everything I did and take pictures, video of me going to church that they would put up on the internet immediately and so on and so forth. Just constant intimidation. I think that anger at the way that the fossil fuel industry has lied to us as we now know from great investigative reporting for 30 years about climate change, a subject that they knew everything there was to know about back in the 1980s. I think that anger is important and well-placed and it's why I've ended up in jail over and over and over again. But I also think that we have to figure out ways to fight hard battles against real opponents without, you know, America's almost over the edge of some kind of dysfunction just in our ability to carry on political life at all. We came within inches of having a violent coup stop the counting of votes in our last election. That's unimaginable when I was a boy, you know, even in the height of something like Watergate. So we better figure out ways to, as Lori said, do this with a certain amount of good humor and things as well. Else the whole thing's just gonna come apart. So we've come to the end of our hour one lesson I did learn in my short stint at Divinity School, it's always better to end a sermon with questions and you and one of your chapters with a few specific questions and I thought I would read from your book. What does it mean to raise the flag of a Lexington Green when the country it symbolizes has so systematically refused to engage with its history? What does it mean to look up at the cross atop the steeple on the church beside the green when that faith that symbolizes has so often embraced the mainstream culture and not the people at whom its message was clearly aimed? What does it mean to enjoy the unprecedented prosperity of the American suburbs when that prosperity now clearly comes at the expense of so many? I don't think that these things are beyond redemption but I also don't think that redeeming is going to be free or even cheap. Since America over these decades has been so wildly successful, the funds are available that bank that Dr. King described has plenty of cash and there's no need for the promissory note to come back marked insufficient funds. Debt are there to be paid. The remaining question is who should pay them? So Bill McKibben, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I wanna thank again our co-sponsors, the Concord Museum, Mass Humanities, the Boston Globe and Middlebury College and especially the National Archives and Records Administration for posting tonight's forum and lastly to all of you for watching. Democracy is never a final achievement, President Kennedy reminded us. It is a call to an untiring effort. And just as those courageous minute men responded to the call of Paul Revere and the other writers in 1775, each of us has a role to play and facing the challenges of our time so eloquently and articulately portrayed by Bill McKibben this evening. Thank you all and good night.