William Ernest "Bill" McKibben (born 1960) is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming and alternative energy and advocates for more localized economies. In 2010 the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" [1] and Time magazine described him as "the world's best green journalist."[2] In 2009 he led the organization of 350.org, which coordinated 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. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature.
McKibben grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. 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.
He currently resides in Vermont with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and their only child, Sophie (born 1993 in Glens Falls, New York). He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. He is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.
McKibben is a frequent contributor to various publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, The Middlebury Campus, 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.
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, 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. [3]
McKibben has been awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993) and a Lyndhurst Fellowship. He won a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Colgate University, the State University of New York, Sterling College, Green Mountain College, Unity College, and Lebanon Valley College.
Step It Up 2007 is a nationwide grassroots 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").
In the wake of Step It Up's achievements, the same team announced a new campaign in March 2008 called 350.org. 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), which is expected to comprise even more activities than the 2009 event.
The Age of Missing Information (1992) ISBN 0-394-58933-5, challenges Marshall McLuhan'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 Flannery, "We're Living on Corn!" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 26-28
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)
Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010) ISBN 978-0-8050-9056-7
Articles
Breaking the Growth Habit in Scientific American April 2010
Renaming of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan as 'Avenue of the Americas'.
Friend whose prior military rank was inadvertently promoted by Geraldine Ferraro.
Textile designers Leslie Tillett and Brian Goodin.
