bill mckibben

In the shadow of the one-year anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear catastrophe in Japan, this week the United Nations General Assembly hosted the "Harmony with Nature" conference to discuss the implementation of new international standards that grant nature equal rights to humans. Renowned environmentalists Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva join us after speaking at the conference. More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to mobilize around the issue of climate change at the Power Shift 2011 Conference. Van Jones, a longtime environmental advocate and former green jobs advisor in the Obama White House, gave the keynote address. At this week’s Power Shift 2011 conference in Washington, D.C., longtime environmental activist Bill McKibben critiqued how the United States has failed to take steps to address climate change. He is the founder of the environmental organization 350.org—the name references the 350 parts per million many scientists say is the safe limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Democracy Now!, a daily independent newshour.

The environmental and climate justice movement isn't just about saving polar bears from melting ice, argues writer and 350.org founder Bill McKibben. It's about rebuilding connection and community, changing the way human beings live, and working in solidarity with human rights organizations across the world to improve all of our lives. And the biggest stumbling block to the growth of a global climate justice movement? It's right under our noses: our own Congress.Bill McKibben is a recipient of this year's Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship, and he joins us in studio for a special one-on-one chat with Laura about the state of the climate justice movement, the Cancun talks, Obama's failure to act, and what we can do to change things before it's too late.

Mad Men harks back to an era when advertising was art and television was educational--maybe. Meanwhile, reality television gives us messages that seem to fit right in with a 1950s ethos--right down to the race, gender, and class politics. Television is everywhere, and everyone is talking about it, so we asked Anna McCarthy, NYU professor and author of The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America, and Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media and News and author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV, to join us to talk TV.Anna and Jenn discuss educational programming and escapism, Mad Men and mommy wars, and of course, the power of advertising in this Friday's feature conversation.What is the key to happiness? How about "community"? This new film by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick and John Page looks at the crisis caused by globalization, and suggests that maybe the solutions to our problems lie in the local economies, local culture and local communities that have been pushed aside to make way for corporate progress.To find out more or to support the film's completion, you can visit their website.This Wednesday was World AIDS day, but instead of honoring the lives lost to the disease, Republicans are attacking art that reflects on it. They're targeting a show at the National Portrait Gallery called Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.The gallery has pulled a video by David Wojnarowicz called "Fire In My Belly." John Boehner and the Catholic League complained that the video's use of Catholic imagery was an attack on their religion. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, but Laura and Wojnarowicz's old friend Philip Yenawine have some thoughts, and we have a selection from his video. It may be disturbing, but censorship definitely is.

"We need to be covering the left as much as we cover, with anxiety, the right," notes Nation contributor and Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell. The lack of coverage of progressive movements, protests, and actions in the face of a loud, angry, and well-funded right wing can be disheartening, but we know they are out there, and in some cases fighting hard to keep a Tea Party backed Republican party from taking back seats in Congress during the midterms. Melissa joins us in studio to discuss the upcoming elections, the media message, and what progressives can do to fight back. "We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible." Who better to say such a thing than Naomi Klein, Nation columnist, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, and longtime rabblerouser? Naomi makes a special visit to the GRITtv studio to talk about the recent G20 meetings in her hometown of Toronto, about Obama's recent return to a kind of populism, the looming midterm elections in the U.S., her reporting on the BP disaster in the Gulf, and what we can do to channel the growing rage in this country and in the world into a true progressive movement. Naomi Klein noted as well, "We don't have the ability to make the economically disposed-of people visible." Indeed, all over the country people are struggling just to survive in the current economic climate. Invisible People is a project aimed at doing just what Klein asked--making those people visible again. In this clip, they bring us the story of Jean and her kids.