The Guardian just published a really nice profile of 350.org founder and all-around environmental guru Bill McKibben. The story digs into his early years as a pioneering environmental journalist and author, as well as his more recent transformation into what scientist Tim Flannery calls “the most effective environmental activist of our age.” Here is a short excerpt about the latter:

Environmental activism was always something that interested McKibben: his first book included a discussion of the radical ideas and direct action campaigns of Earth First! and other conservationists in the western US. But he was a writer: he and [his wife Sue] Halpern built their home [in Vermont] on land once owned by the poet Robert Frost, whose own summer cabin is nearby, “so there’s some good writing karma, and lots of trees”.

“I think my assumption when I was 27 was that explaining rationally all the trouble we’re in would be sufficient, and that politicians and whoever would act. I’m older now and I think I’ve come to understand a little more clearly that we’re going to need to build some power if we’re going to mount a serious challenge,” he says.

So in 1997, as well as publishing two books, McKibben launched Step It Up, with the help of students at Middlebury College where he is scholar in residence, and organised rallies urging Congress to cut carbon emissions. Step It Up morphed into 350.org, named to fix in people’s minds the 350 parts of CO2 per million in the atmosphere that scientists believe is safe. Currently there are 388ppm, and some previous forecasts suggested 450ppm might be OK. But in 2007 the Nasa climate scientist James Hansen revised this figure down to 350, and 350.org set about trying to persuade the world to believe him. It is this work that currently takes up most of McKibben’s time. Now he is off to Cancún in Mexico for the current round of UN climate talks, though he is not expecting a breakthrough.

• The Indigenous Environmental Network and allies protested the Tar Sands gigaproject scheme in front of the Moon Palace in Cancun, where the UN climate negotiations are taking place.

• Frustrated Hatian presidential candidates led a march through Port-au-Prince capital Thursday to demand officials annul an election they say was tainted by fraud.

• About 150 students and faculty at the University of Texas in Austin protested possible budget cuts to liberal arts programs.

• Nine protesters, some in bagel costumes, were arrested Wednesday morning for blocking traffic outside the mayor’s World AIDS Day Bagel Breakfast at the Brooklyn Public Library. The demonstrators, from the nonprofit group Housing Works, were protesting devastating cuts that the mayor proposes each year to city services for low-income people with AIDS.

• The occupation of a lecture hall at the University of Nottingham, which began on the November 30th following a second on-campus protest against the cuts to the Education budget and the subsequent rise in tuition fees, reached its third day yesterday.

• About 150 employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District wearing red and white union T-shirts gathered outside the school district headquarters on Tuesday to protest the layoffs of about 1,000 non-teaching staffers.

• Some 40 unemployed demonstrators gathered at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree-lighting ceremony on Tuesday to protest the end of unemployment benefits, which will affect millions of Americans.

Yesterday marked the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the “colored” section of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of civil disobedience led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted for more than a year, until the US Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional. On December 20, 1956, the day the federal ruling took effect, an integrated group of Montgomery Bus Boycott supporters, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, rode the city’s buses. Here is a great picture from that day, showing what we so rarely get to see: concrete victory.

At the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis there is a great exhibit on the bus boycott with an actual bus from that era. When you walk onto the bus, which has a surprisingly accurate Rosa Parks mannequin sitting in one of the seats, the feeling is somewhat overwhelming. Rarely does history seem so present and immediate. The whole museum is like that and I highly recommend a visit.

The words “irresponsible,” “reckless” and “dangerous” have been thrown around so much in connection with the Wikileaks release of State Department cables that I’m surprised the Daily Show hasn’t yet made one of its patented sound bite montages. Picture it, one right after the other: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senator John Kerry, Senator Joe Lieberman and numerous other US politicians, all saying the same three words.

What we have here are a lot of angry people who all got the same talking points memo. Then there’s Sarah Palin (who demanded Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be hunted down like Osama bin Laden) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (who called for whistleblower Bradley Manning’s execution). Too far? I would like to think so, but it seems not. The mainstream press has reprocessed it all into a convenient meme that has most Americans believing Wikileaks is a disreputable hack media outfit that’s endangering our security.

As journalist Pierre Tristam noted:

It’s an indication of how willingly the American public has swallowed the lies and assumptions of the national security state as necessary  that more people instinctively agree with the government’s defense of secrecy than applaud the whistle-blowing. It’s a variation of the Stockholm Syndrome: captives coming to the defense of their captors. In summer, when Wikileaks made public almost 100,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan, 66 percent of those questioned in a Gallup poll declared the release “wrong.” Curiously, when CBC, the Canadian news agency, polled Canadians about the latest leak, 85 percent were in favor. Naturally: the world prefers to be better informed, for once, about how the United States exercises its power.

The belief that Wikileaks is somehow a threat to US security is not founded in any fact. As McClatchey Newspapers reported on Monday, even “US officials conceded that they have no evidence to date that the release of documents led to anyone’s death.”

Meanwhile, the documents themselves certainly reveal US complicity in the deaths of innocent people. One cable describes a meeting where Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told Gen David Petraeus that: “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” essentially revealing that the US (not Yemen) had carried out a missile strike in Yemen last year that killed dozens of local residents.

Amazingly, this revelation has been used as an example of a “negative consequence” of the Wikileaks release by—as NPR wrote in defense of US government interests— “providing more fodder for al-Qaida’s recruitment efforts in Yemen and abroad.” Former Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin has been making the rounds to further hammer this point home. On Tuesday’s Colbert Report, Rubin said:

In general, diplomats have to resolve problems by resolving an issue privately and that might include allowing a leader to say something publicly that is different than what they say privately. So we might have to allow a hypocrisy in an Arab country if it’s going to get the job done.

In short, Rubin is saying our security is contingent on lies—lies that allow us to bomb other countries, killing innocent people, under someone else’s name. As journalist Norman Solomon recently pondered, “what kind of ‘national security’ can be built on duplicity from a government that is discredited and refuted by its own documents?”

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In a new effort to teach young people about how to resolve problems without resorting to violence, students at Champlain College in Vermont have designed a video game called Breakaway, that uses soccer as a backdrop to get into some serious issues. As an recent Inter Press Service article explains:

The game was released in June 2010 just in time for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Since its inception, it has been hailed by critics, fans and players as a masterly attempt to create new discourses and open doors around the contentious issues of gender violence, racial stereotyping and fair team play.

Endorsed by Cameroonian football star Samuel Eto’o, Breakaway is the first narrative-driven interactive online game of its kind and is currently being distributed free around the world via the internet and youth organizations.

[...]

Breakaway is premised on the ideal of ‘fair play’, and the player is forced to make choices based on a host of situations before he or she is allowed to advance in the game.

[...]

Less than six months after its release, Breakaway is making monumental progress. The game’s designers have already recorded over a thousand registered users from 95 different countries.

The game can be played for free here, so check it out and spread the word.

• Thousands of Greek journalists staged a nationwide strike on Tuesday to protest against wage cuts and lay-offs in their sector, hit by the recession as the country struggles to recover from a debt-crisis.

• A seven-day strike by Nigerian gas tanker drivers, which was launched on Monday to protest the Nov. 9 killing of a driver at a joint police-army checkpoint, is creating long lines at gas stations in Africa’s top oil producer and crippling activity in its cities.

• On Sunday evening, thousands of members of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) and the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) staged a 24-hour strike to protest planned job cuts, the fourth 24-hour strike on London tube system since August.

• More than 50 workers at a Bahrain contracting company went on strike yesterday, claiming they had not been paid for six to eight months.

• Workers building a new power station for EDF Energy in West Burton in Nottinghamshire staged a sit-in yesterday in a row over working conditions.

• The streets of Ayala, the old financial capital of Manila, were taken over by about 5000 people on November 25 in a protest against the growing use of contract labor.

• In Venice, protesters for several hours staged a sit-in at the city’s train station, while, thousands of students took to the streets in several other Italian cities to protest what they allege are crippling cuts to state tertiary education institutions.

• Members of the group “Women and Men of Zimbabwe Arise” (WOZA and MOZA) marked November 29, 2010, International Women Human Rights Defenders Day with a peaceful march in central Bulawayo to the offices of the state-owned Chronical news offices.

• An estimated 3 million workers walked off the job last Wednesday in Portugal’s first general strike in 22 years, a protest against austerity measures imposed by a government under market pressure to cut spending.