Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

Last night I went to hear best-selling author Bill McKibben speak. Global HEATING is a reality. So, we should stop the political ya-yahhing and focus on the problem. Just this week a a massive ice shelf collapsed in Antarctica - something that was supposed to maybe happen thirty years from now.

Mr. McKibben has started a movement, 350. Here’s his letter on the 350.org site:

350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

We’re planning an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, and we need your help. We need to make sure that the solutions the world proposes to climate change are to scale with the level of crisis that this number represents. Everyone on earth, from the smallest village to the cushiest corner office, needs to know what 350 means. The movement to spread that number needs to be beautiful, creative, and unstoppable.

What we need most right now are your ideas for how to take the number 350 and drive it home: in art, in music, in political demonstrations, in any other way you can imagine. We will connect actions all around the world and make them add up to more than the sum of their parts–but we don’t have all the ideas and all the inspiration. We need yours.

We could also use your help spreading 350. Can you contact anyone you think might be interested and willing to help–in every country on earth–and send them our way?

Many thanks,

Bill McKibben and the 350.org crew.

It won’t do us much good to have great global-spanning networks and business-friendly governments if we’re all underwater or can’t breath the air.

As I told Mr. McKibben after the talk, “I think we may all be doomed, but I plan on going down fighting.”

What about you?

Tags: global warming, global heating, 350.org, Wikins Ice Shelf, Bill McKibben