My text was published in Rolling Stone in December 2013. Rolling Stone is a pretty progressive, liberal magazine. It has been criticized for this. It's also a magazine that tends to focus on popular culture, at least historically.
Bill Mckibben grew up in a suburb of Boston in the 1960s and 70s. His background is in journalism. He wrote for his highschool paper and was the editor of the Harvard Crimson during his time as an undergraduate at Harvard. He decided to dedicate his life to environmental issues in the 1980s. He wrote for the New Yorker for years, and then moved to the Adirondack mountains of New York and worked as a freelance writer.
The key cultural values, ideas, and beliefs that play a role in this text are environmentalism, and the idea that there is an ethical obligation to leave the planet in livable condition for future generations, and that the fossil fuel industry is fundamentally in opposition to this goal, simply because of their economic stake in the issue. There's also the idea that as a world-leader, the United States should be leading the way on Climate Action.
The text addresses all these issues very directly -- most everything is explicit and it's easy to tell what Mckibben is arguing. He lays everything out very clearly and then gives his opinion on everything. He is critical of Obama's lack of leadership and action on Climate Change, and of the fossil fuel industry.
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| chesapeakeclimate. "Bill Mckibben" 7/10/2011 via wikimedia commons. Creative commons license. |
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