Bill McKibben
Encyclopedia
William Ernest "Bill" McKibben (born 1960) is an American
environmentalist
, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming
. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College
. In 2010, the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" and Time magazine described him as "the world's best green journalist."
In 2009, he led the organization of 350.org
, which organized what Foreign Policy
magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind," with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries as he had told a large gathering at Warren Wilson College
shortly before the event. In December 2010, 350.org coordinated a planet-scale art project, with many of the 20 works visible from satellites.
, Massachusetts
where he attended Lexington High School. As an undergraduate at Harvard University
, he was president of The Harvard Crimson
newspaper. Immediately after college he joined The New Yorker
as a staff writer and wrote much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn
was forced out of his job and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains
of upstate New York
.
, The Atlantic, Harper's, Orion magazine, Mother Jones
, The American Prospect
, The New York Review of Books
, Granta
, National Geographic, Rolling Stone
and Outside
. He is also a board member at and contributor to Grist Magazine
.
His first book, The End of Nature
, was published in 1989 by Random House
after being serialized in the New Yorker
. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.
His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment in which McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Virginia
, system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.
Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job
and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; and Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Speaking about Long Distance at the Cambridge Forum, McKibben cited the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
and Csikszentmihalyi's idea of "flow
" relative to feelings he, McKibben, had had -- "taking a break from saving the world", he joked -- as he immersed in cross-country skiing
competitions.
Wandering Home, is about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain
in Ripton
, Vermont
back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks. His book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
, published in March 2007, was a national bestseller. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.
In the fall of 2007 he published, with the other members of his Step It Up team, Fight Global Warming Now, a handbook for activists trying to organize their local communities. In 2008 came The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life, a collection of essays spanning his career. Also in 2008, the Library of America
published "American Earth," an anthology of American environmental writing since Thoreau edited by McKibben.
In 2010 he published another national bestseller, Eaarth:Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
, an account of the rapid onset of climate change. It was excerpted in Scientific American
.
environmental
campaign started by McKibben to demand action on global warming
by the U.S. Congress.
In late summer 2006 he helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to call for action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007, he founded Step It Up 2007, which organized rallies in hundreds of American cities and towns on April 14, 2007 to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The campaign quickly won widespread support from a wide variety of environmental, student, and religious groups.
In August 2007 McKibben announced Step It Up 2, to take place November 3, 2007. In addition to the 80% by 2050 slogan from the first campaign, the second adds "10% [reduction of emissions] in three years ("Hit the Ground Running"), 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" (called "Green Jobs Now, and No New Coal").
. The organizing effort, aimed at the entire globe, drew its name from climate scientist James E. Hansen's contention earlier that winter that any atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
(CO2) above 350 parts per million was unsafe. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that." Hansen et al. stated in the Abstract to their paper.
350.org, which has offices and organizers in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, attempted to spread that 350 number in advance of international climate meetings in December 2009 in Copenhagen. It was widely covered in the media. On Oct. 24, 2009 it coordinated more than 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, and was widely lauded for its creative use of internet tools, with the website Critical Mass declaring that it was "one of the strongest examples of social media optimization the world has ever seen."
Subsequently the organization continued its work, with the Global Work Party on 10/10/10 (10 October 2010).
(1993) and a Lyndhurst Fellowship. He won a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction writing in 2000. In 2010, Utne Reader
magazine listed McKibben as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He has honorary degrees from Colgate University, the State University of New York, Sterling College
, Green Mountain College
, Unity College
, and Lebanon Valley College
. In 2010 he won the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship
for his work with 350.org
with his wife, writer Sue Halpern. Their only child, a daughter named Sophie, was born in 1993 in Glens Falls, New York
. He is a Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College
, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. McKibben is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute
. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church
, and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
environmentalist
Environmentalist
An environmentalist broadly supports the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities"...
, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
. In 2010, the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" and Time magazine described him as "the world's best green journalist."
In 2009, he led the organization of 350.org
350.org
350.org is an international environmental organization, headed by author Bill McKibben, with the goal of building a global grassroots movement to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, to confront climate change denial, and to cut emissions of one of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide,...
, which organized what Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy is a bimonthly American magazine founded in 1970 by Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel.Originally, the magazine was a quarterly...
magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind," with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries as he had told a large gathering at Warren Wilson College
Warren Wilson College
Warren Wilson College is a private four-year work college in the Swannanoa Valley, North Carolina, United States near Asheville. It is known for its curriculum of work, academics, and service, called "the Triad," which requires every student to work an on-campus job, perform at least one hundred...
shortly before the event. In December 2010, 350.org coordinated a planet-scale art project, with many of the 20 works visible from satellites.
Early life
McKibben grew up in suburban LexingtonLexington, Massachusetts
Lexington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 31,399 at the 2010 census. This town is famous for being the site of the first shot of the American Revolution, in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775.- History :...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
where he attended Lexington High School. As an undergraduate at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, he was president of The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...
newspaper. Immediately after college he joined The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
as a staff writer and wrote much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn
William Shawn
William Shawn was an American magazine editor who edited The New Yorker from 1952 until 1987.-Education and Early Life:...
was forced out of his job and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains
Adirondack Mountains
The Adirondack Mountains are a mountain range located in the northeastern part of New York, that runs through Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, Herkimer, Lewis, Saint Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington counties....
of upstate New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
Writing
McKibben is a frequent contributor to various publications including The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, The Atlantic, Harper's, Orion magazine, Mother Jones
Mother Jones (magazine)
Mother Jones is an American independent news organization, featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. Mother Jones has been nominated for 23 National Magazine Awards and has won six times, including for General Excellence in 2001,...
, The American Prospect
The American Prospect
The American Prospect is a monthly American political magazine dedicated to American liberalism. Based in Washington, DC, The American Prospect is a journal "of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics" which focuses on United States politics...
, The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
, Granta
Granta
Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...
, National Geographic, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and Outside
Outside (magazine)
Outside is an American magazine focused on the outdoors. The first issue debuted in September 1977 with its mission statement declaring that the publication was "dedicated to covering the people, sports and activities, politics, art, literature, and hardware of the outdoors..."Its founders were...
. He is also a board member at and contributor to Grist Magazine
Grist Magazine
Grist is a free American liberal non-profit online magazine that has been publishing environmental news and commentary with a wry twist since 1999. Grists taglines are "Gloom and doom with a sense of humor" and "A beacon in the smog"...
.
His first book, The End of Nature
The End of Nature
The End of Nature is a book written by Bill McKibben, published by Anchor in 1989. It has been called the first book on global warming written for a general audience...
, was published in 1989 by Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
after being serialized in the New Yorker
New Yorker
New Yorker may refer to:* A resident of New York City * A resident of New York state * The New Yorker, a magazine* A predecessor newspaper to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune...
. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.
His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment in which McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Virginia
Fairfax, Virginia
The City of Fairfax is an independent city forming an enclave within the confines of Fairfax County, in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. Although politically independent of the surrounding county, the City is nevertheless the county seat....
, system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.
Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job
Book of Job
The Book of Job , commonly referred to simply as Job, is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible. It relates the story of Job, his trials at the hands of Satan, his discussions with friends on the origins and nature of his suffering, his challenge to God, and finally a response from God. The book is a...
and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; and Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering and nanotechnology. Speaking about Long Distance at the Cambridge Forum, McKibben cited the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. Now at Claremont Graduate University, he is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake...
and Csikszentmihalyi's idea of "flow
Flow (psychology)
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of...
" relative to feelings he, McKibben, had had -- "taking a break from saving the world", he joked -- as he immersed in cross-country skiing
Cross-country skiing
Cross-country skiing is a winter sport in which participants propel themselves across snow-covered terrain using skis and poles...
competitions.
Wandering Home, is about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain
Lake Champlain
Lake Champlain is a natural, freshwater lake in North America, located mainly within the borders of the United States but partially situated across the Canada—United States border in the Canadian province of Quebec.The New York portion of the Champlain Valley includes the eastern portions of...
in Ripton
Ripton, Vermont
Ripton is a town in Addison County, Vermont, United States. The population was 556 at the 2000 census. The Bread Loaf Writer's Conference is held annually in Ripton. Jessica Ravitz of CNN said that the town "is the kind of place where cell service fails more often than it works and the country...
, Vermont
Vermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks. His book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Deep Economy
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future is a non-fiction work by environmentalist Bill McKibben published in 2007 in the field of ecological economics. It promotes sustainable economy through close communities, with regions generating their own food, energy, culture and...
, published in March 2007, was a national bestseller. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.
In the fall of 2007 he published, with the other members of his Step It Up team, Fight Global Warming Now, a handbook for activists trying to organize their local communities. In 2008 came The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life, a collection of essays spanning his career. Also in 2008, the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
published "American Earth," an anthology of American environmental writing since Thoreau edited by McKibben.
In 2010 he published another national bestseller, Eaarth:Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Eaarth
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is a book written by Bill McKibben, published by Henry Holt and Company in 2010.In the opening chapter, McKibben presents an array of facts and statistics about changes that are already visible, supported by extensive footnotes...
, an account of the rapid onset of climate change. It was excerpted in Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
.
Step It Up
Step It Up 2007 is a nationwide grassrootsGrassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
environmental
Environmentalism
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment, particularly as the measure for this health seeks to incorporate the concerns of non-human elements...
campaign started by McKibben to demand action on global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
by the U.S. Congress.
In late summer 2006 he helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to call for action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007, he founded Step It Up 2007, which organized rallies in hundreds of American cities and towns on April 14, 2007 to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The campaign quickly won widespread support from a wide variety of environmental, student, and religious groups.
In August 2007 McKibben announced Step It Up 2, to take place November 3, 2007. In addition to the 80% by 2050 slogan from the first campaign, the second adds "10% [reduction of emissions] in three years ("Hit the Ground Running"), 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" (called "Green Jobs Now, and No New Coal").
350.org
In the wake of Step It Up's achievements, the same team announced a new campaign in March 2008 called 350.org350.org
350.org is an international environmental organization, headed by author Bill McKibben, with the goal of building a global grassroots movement to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, to confront climate change denial, and to cut emissions of one of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide,...
. The organizing effort, aimed at the entire globe, drew its name from climate scientist James E. Hansen's contention earlier that winter that any atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring chemical compound composed of two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom...
(CO2) above 350 parts per million was unsafe. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that." Hansen et al. stated in the Abstract to their paper.
350.org, which has offices and organizers in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, attempted to spread that 350 number in advance of international climate meetings in December 2009 in Copenhagen. It was widely covered in the media. On Oct. 24, 2009 it coordinated more than 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, and was widely lauded for its creative use of internet tools, with the website Critical Mass declaring that it was "one of the strongest examples of social media optimization the world has ever seen."
Subsequently the organization continued its work, with the Global Work Party on 10/10/10 (10 October 2010).
Awards
McKibben has been awarded both a Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
(1993) and a Lyndhurst Fellowship. He won a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction writing in 2000. In 2010, Utne Reader
Utne Reader
Utne Reader is an American bimonthly magazine. The magazine collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music and DVDs...
magazine listed McKibben as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He has honorary degrees from Colgate University, the State University of New York, Sterling College
Sterling College (Vermont)
Sterling College is a college in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, known as the smallest accredited four-year college in the country. Sterling is one of seven colleges in the Work College Consortium. The school is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges...
, Green Mountain College
Green Mountain College
Green Mountain College is a coeducational private environmental liberal arts college located in Poultney, Vermont, in the USA.Green Mountain is located in the Vermont countryside, at the foot of the Taconic Mountains between the Green Mountains and Adirondacks.The College has a core set of courses...
, Unity College
Unity College (Maine)
Unity College is a private, liberal arts college in Unity, Waldo County, Maine. It is located southwest of Bangor, Maine and from the Maine coast. The college offers an undergraduate education that emphasizes the environment and natural resources throughout the academic program. In 2007 the...
, and Lebanon Valley College
Lebanon Valley College
Lebanon Valley College is a small, liberal arts higher education institution situated in the heart of Annville in Lebanon County, east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.-History:...
. In 2010 he won the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship
Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship
The Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship is an American award citation given jointly by the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation. The annual $100,000 award honors artists and others for “socially responsible work” and challenges to authority...
for his work with 350.org
Personal life
McKibben currently resides in VermontVermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
with his wife, writer Sue Halpern. Their only child, a daughter named Sophie, was born in 1993 in Glens Falls, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He is a Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. McKibben is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute
Post Carbon Institute
Post Carbon Institute is a think tank which provides information and analysis on emerging responses and strategies to climate change, energy scarcity, overconsumption, economics and other issues related to sustainability and long term social resilience...
. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
, and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature.
Books
- The End of NatureThe End of NatureThe End of Nature is a book written by Bill McKibben, published by Anchor in 1989. It has been called the first book on global warming written for a general audience...
(1989) ISBN 0-385-41604-0 - The Age of Missing Information (1992) ISBN 0-394-58933-5, challenges Marshall McLuhanMarshall McLuhanHerbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
's "global village" ideal and claims the standardization of life in electronic media is that of image and not substance, resulting in a loss of meaningful content in society - Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995) ISBN 0-316-56064-2
- Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families (1998) ISBN 0-684-85281-0
- Hundred Dollar Holiday (1998) ISBN 0-684-85595-X
- Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously (2001) ISBN 0-452-28270-5
- Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003) ISBN 0-8050-7096-6
- Wandering Home (2005) ISBN 0-609-61073-2
- The Comforting Whirlwind : God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005) ISBN 1-56101-234-3
- Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007) ISBN 0-8050-7626-3
- Reviewed in Tim FlanneryTim FlanneryTimothy Fridtjof Flannery is an Australian mammalogist, palaeontologist, environmentalist and global warming activist....
, "We're Living on Corn!" The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
54/11 (28 June 2007) : 26-28
- Reviewed in Tim Flannery
- Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community (2007)
- The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life (2008)
- American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (edited) (2008)
- Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New PlanetEaarthEaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is a book written by Bill McKibben, published by Henry Holt and Company in 2010.In the opening chapter, McKibben presents an array of facts and statistics about changes that are already visible, supported by extensive footnotes...
(2010) ISBN 978-0-8050-9056-7 - The Global Warming Reader (OR BooksOR BooksOR Books is a New York-based independent publishing house founded by two veterans of the publishing industry, John Oakes and Colin Robinson, in 2009. The company, a "digital upstart", claims to offer a revolutionary approach to publishing by printing on demand, selling directly to the customer,...
, 2011) ISBN 978-1-935928-36-2
Articles
- Breaking the Growth Habit in Scientific AmericanScientific AmericanScientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
April 2010 Renaming of Sixth AvenueSixth Avenue (Manhattan)Sixth Avenue – officially Avenue of the Americas, although this name is seldom used by New Yorkers – is a major thoroughfare in New York City's borough of Manhattan, on which traffic runs northbound, or "uptown"...
in ManhattanManhattanManhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
as 'Avenue of the Americas'. Friend whose prior military rank was inadvertently promoted by Geraldine FerraroGeraldine FerraroGeraldine Anne Ferraro was an American attorney, a Democratic Party politician, and a member of the United States House of Representatives. She was the first female Vice Presidential candidate representing a major American political party....
. Textile designers Leslie Tillett and Brian Goodin. Rolls RoyceRolls-Royce (car)This a list of Rolls-Royce motor cars and includes vehicles produced by:*Rolls-Royce Limited *Rolls-Royce Motors , which was owned by Vickers between 1980 and 1998, and after that by Volkswagen...
grille designer Tony Kent.
External links
- Bill McKibben's Official Website
- Bill McKibben on "Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet" - video by Democracy Now!Democracy Now!Democracy Now! and its staff have received several journalism awards, including the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio & Television; the George Polk Award for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of...
- MNN.com review of 'Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet'
- Sept 1, 2010 appearance on David Letterman Show
- McKibben: Climate Talks Weakened by U.S., Major Polluters - video report by Democracy Now!Democracy Now!Democracy Now! and its staff have received several journalism awards, including the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio & Television; the George Polk Award for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of...
- Can China Go Green? No other country is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much coal to fuel its economy June 2011 National Geographic