Bill McKibben

McKibben was born in Palo Alto, California.[1][15] His family later moved to the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts, where he attended high school.[16] 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.[16] As a high school student, McKibben wrote for the local paper and participated in statewide debate competitions.[16] 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.[17]

In 1980, following the election of Ronald Reagan, he determined to dedicate his life to the environmental cause.[18]

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. He shared an apartment with David Edelstein, the film critic, and found solace in the Gospel of Matthew. He became an advocate of nonviolent resistance. 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.[18] 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.[19]

McKibben began his freelance writing career at about the same time that climate change appeared on the public agenda following the hot summer and fires of 1988 and testimony by James Hansen before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in June of that year.[20] His first contribution to the debate was a brief list of literature on the subject and commentary published December 1988 in The New York Review of Books and a question, "Is the World Getting Hotter?"[21][22]

He became and remains a frequent contributor to various publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's, Orion, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New York Review of Books, Granta, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Adbusters, and Outside. He is also a board member at and contributor to Grist.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in The New Yorker. Described by Ray Murphy of the Boston Globe as a "righteous jeremiad," the book excited much critical comment, pro and con; was for many people their first introduction to the question of climate change;[23] and the inspiration for a great deal of writing and publishing by others.[24] It has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

In 1992 The Age of Missing Information was published. 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 programming, 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.[25][26]

McKibben speaking at a Bernie Sanders campaign rally at Southern New Hampshire University in January 2016

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 McKibben had had—"taking a break from saving the world", he joked—as he immersed himself in cross-country skiing competitions.[27]

Wandering Home is about a long solo hiking trip from his 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 he sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In fall 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.[28]

On April 19, 2019, McKibben published 'Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play itself Out?, which details the growing concerns over climate change, how the Koch Brothers are contributing to an increase in carbon emissions by funding oil companies, and his concern with libertarianism, which he argues was sparked by the politics of the Reagan Revolution. He frequently argues that the Nordic model is preferable to a deregulated capitalist system, and that rapid innovation may come to hurt humanity.

Some of his work has been extremely[29][30] popular; an article in Rolling Stone in July 2012 received over 125,000 likes on Facebook, 14,000 tweets, and 5,000 comments.[29][30]

• McKibben has been awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship (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."[40]
• He has honorary degrees from Whittier College,[41] Marlboro College, Colgate University, the State University of New York, Sterling College, Green Mountain College, Unity College, and Lebanon Valley College.
• He won the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship in 2010, for his work with 350.org[42]
• McKibben was the recipient of the Sierra Club's highest honor in 2011, the John Muir Award.[43]
• In 2012, he won the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson College;[44] 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.[45]
• In 2013, he won the international environment and development prize Sophie Prize.
• McKibben and 350.org were awarded the Right Livelihood Award 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".[13]

McKibben resides in Ripton, Vermont, 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.[46] McKibben is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. He is a long-time Methodist.[47]

Since 2013, McKibben has been listed on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education.[48]

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.[49] Two years later, he wrote in the Times that he has been receiving death threats since the 1990s.[50]

In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, McKibben signed a letter endorsing the 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 prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few."[51][52]

• Individual and political action on climate change

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bill McKibben.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Bill McKibben

• Official website
• Bill McKibben at IMDb
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Review of 'Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet' at Mother Nature Network
• Keystone: How Bill McKibben Turned a Pipeline into an Environmental Rallying Point March 5, 2012
• Bill McKibben's Battle Against the Keystone XL Pipeline February 28, 2013 BusinessWeek
• "The Singularity" a documentary film featuring McKibben