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Bill McKibben

William Ernest McKibben (born December 8, 1960)[1] 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[2] and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.[3]

Bill McKibben

William Ernest McKibben
(1960-12-08) December 8, 1960
Palo Alto, California, U.S.

Sue Halpern

1

In 2009, he led 350.org's organization of 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries,[4][5] 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.[6] In 2011 and 2012 he led the environmental campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project[7] and spent three days in jail in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later he was inducted into the literature section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[8]


He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013.[9] Foreign Policy magazine named him to its inaugural list[10] of the 100 most important global thinkers in 2009 and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009.[11] In 2010, the Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist"[12] and Time magazine book reviewer Bryan Walsh described him as "the world's best green journalist".[13] In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "mobilizing growing popular support in the USA and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change."[14] He has been mentioned as a possible future Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Energy should a progressive be elected President.[15]

Early life[edit]

McKibben was born in Palo Alto, California.[1][16] His family later moved to the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts, where he attended high school.[17] His father, who once, in 1971, had been arrested during a protest in support of Vietnam veterans against the war, wrote for Business Week, before becoming business editor at The Boston Globe, in 1980.[17] As a high school student, McKibben wrote for the local paper and participated in statewide debate competitions.[17] Entering Harvard College in 1978, he became an editor of The Harvard Crimson and was chosen president of the paper for the calendar year 1981.[18]


In 1980, following the election of Ronald Reagan, he determined to dedicate his life to the environmental cause.[19]


Graduating in 1982, he worked for five years for The New Yorker as a staff writer, writing much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. Inspired by the Gospel of Matthew, he became an advocate of nonviolent resistance.[20] While doing a story on the homeless, he lived on the streets; there, he met his wife, Sue Halpern, who was working as a homeless advocate. In 1987, McKibben quit The New Yorker after longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job.[19] He and his family shortly after moved to a remote spot in the Southeastern Adirondacks of upstate New York, where he began to work as a freelance writer.[21]

Views[edit]

In 2016, McKibben wrote in The New York Times that he is "under surveillance" by "right-wing stalkers" who photograph, pursue, and inquire about him and members of his family in search of ostensible instances of environmental hypocrisy. "I'm being watched", he reported.[47] Two years later, he wrote in the Times that he had been receiving death threats since the 1990s.[48]


In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, McKibben signed a letter endorsing the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 general election. The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritizes the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."[49][50]

Personal life[edit]

McKibben resides in Ripton, Vermont, with his wife, writer Sue Halpern. Their only child, 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.[51] McKibben is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. He is a longtime Methodist.[52]


Since 2013, McKibben has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.[53]

McKibben has been awarded both a (1993) and a Lyndhurst Fellowship.

Guggenheim Fellowship

He won a for nonfiction writing in 2000.

Lannan Literary Award

In 2010, magazine listed McKibben as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."[54]

Utne Reader

He has honorary degrees from (2010),[55] Marlboro College, Colgate University, the State University of New York, Sterling College, Green Mountain College, Unity College, and Lebanon Valley College.

Whittier College

He won the in 2010, for his work with 350.org[56]

Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship

McKibben was the recipient of the highest honor in 2011, the John Muir Award.[57]

Sierra Club's

In 2012, he won the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson College; accepting the prize, he told the graduating Dickinson students that, in addition to be the greatest problem of their lives, global climate change is the greatest challenge that has ever confronted human society.[59]

[58]

In 2013, he won the international environment and development prize .

Sophie Prize

McKibben and 350.org were awarded the in 2014 for mobilizing growing popular support in the United States and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change".[14]

Right Livelihood Award

McKibben, Bill (1986). The End of Nature. New York: Random House.

The Age of Missing Information (1992)  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

ISBN

Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995)  0-316-56064-2

ISBN

Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families (1998)  0-684-85281-0

ISBN

Hundred Dollar Holiday (1998)  0-684-85595-X

ISBN

Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously (2001)  0-452-28270-5

ISBN

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003)  0-8050-7096-6

ISBN

Wandering Home (2005)  0-609-61073-2

ISBN

The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005)  1-56101-234-3

ISBN

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Tim Flannery

Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community (2007)  9780805087048

ISBN

The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life (2008)  9780805076271

ISBN

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (edited) (2008)  9781598530209

ISBN

(2010) ISBN 978-0-8050-9056-7

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

(OR Books, 2011) ISBN 978-1-935928-36-2

The Global Warming Reader

Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (Times Books, 2013)  9780805092844[a]

ISBN

Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance. (Blue Rider Press, 2017)  9780735219861, 9781524743727

ISBN

. Description & arrow/scrollable preview. (Henry Holt and Co., 2019) ISBN 9781250178268[b]

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

We Are Better Together, (Henry Holt and Co., 2022) ISBN 9781250755155

[c]

The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened (Henry Holt and Co., 2022) ISBN 9781250823601

[d]

McKibben, Bill (June 18, 2010). . Point of Inquiry. Retrieved January 15, 2017.

"Point of Inquiry - Our Strange New Eaarth"

McKibben, Bill (March 24, 2012). . Saturday Extra. Australia: ABC Radio National. Retrieved July 14, 2012.

"The rise of public radio in the US"

McKibben, Bill (September 17, 2014). . United States: Blog Talk Radio. Retrieved September 23, 2014.

"People's Climate March with Rev. Yearwood"

Individual and political action on climate change

Official website

at The New Yorker

Articles by Bill McKibben

at IMDb

Bill McKibben

on C-SPAN

Appearances

Archived November 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine at Mother Nature Network

Review of 'Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet'

March 5, 2012

Keystone: How Bill McKibben Turned a Pipeline into an Environmental Rallying Point

February 28, 2013 BusinessWeek

Bill McKibben's Battle Against the Keystone XL Pipeline

"The Singularity", a documentary film featuring McKibben

1989-11-29, WILL Illinois Public Media, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC.

“Focus; The End of Nature,”