Bill McKibben speaks at Books & Books Thursday, Nov. 29.

Green’s become a catchphrase, a marketing tool, in many cases, a blind, but that in no way diminishes what it means to really go there. Yet going someplace requires more than merely changing your outfit; it means doing something.

If it were up to ace environmentalist Bill McKibben, we’d all be doing something, daily, and said something would not only save the Earth — it’d save us from ourselves. Back in 1989, McKibben published The End of Nature and put the know of global warning into even the lay person’s mind. Of course, all but the staunchest of enviro-conscious thinkers thought McKibben completely out of his own mind, but that didn’t stop him from spouting what was on it.

If anything, it might’ve spurred him to spout off even more. Nature begat The Age of Missing Information, which made mincemeat of McLuhan’s utopian global village; Information spawned Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, a trek that went sustainably from Kerala, India, to Curitiba, Brazil; Hope swelled to Maybe One (in praise of single child families), Long Distance (a year of living strenuously), Enough (the hazards of genetic engineering), up to this year’s bestseller, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, a manifesto that not only differentiated between “more” and “better,” but showed that they’ve now become opposites.

In between, there were treatises on job and home, and essays in an array of esteemed publications from Mother Jones to New York Times Magazine, including, in the last month or so alone, works in the Los Angeles Times (“The Power of the Click”), The Washington Post (“The Race Against Warming”) and National Geographic (“The New Carbon Math”).

But it is to global warming that McKibben’s been most fervently drawn, and to which he’s devoted most of his attention.

McKibben’s Step it Up movement, which launched back in April and reprised on Nov. 3, is out for “an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, 10 percent in three years, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants and a Green Jobs Corps to help fix homes and businesses so those targets can be met.” Billed initially as “the first open source, Web-based day of action dedicated to stopping climate change,” McKibben and company’s action has become the kind of grassroots effort that actually empowers people.

The campaign also got the attention of the Democratic candidates for president (Senators Dodd and Edwards each attended events, as did Kucinich; the rest of the field sent representatives), as well as too many members of Congress to list here (yet hopefully enough to matter).

Round three seems to be Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community (Holt $13), a guidebook that walks readers through some steps they can take on their home turf. Full of facts, to be sure, this really is more of a call to arms. After all, we are in a war. With cats like McKibben leading the charge, this war might even be won.

Saddle up, soldiers.

Bill McKibben appears at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408.