Environmentalist Bill McKibben speaking at Berea College April 17

4/1/08

McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including “The End of Nature,” “Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future” and most recently “The Bill McKibben Reader,” a collection of 44 essays written over the past 25 years.  In 2007, he was the lead organizer for the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history, and is co-founder of a new world-wide movement focused on climate change, called 350.org.

McKibben is scheduled to speak at 3 p.m. in Phelps Stokes Chapel at Berea on “The Search for a Hopeful Future.”  Admission is free and open to the public.

McKibben writes about a wide range of environmental and cultural issues, including global warming, alternative energy and the risks associated with human genetic engineering.  He is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent.

His first book, “The End of Nature,” was published in 1989 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.  In “The Age of Missing Information,” McKibben compares his experience watching 2,400 hours of television (everything that came across 100 channels of cable tv in Fairfax, Va. for a single day) with a day spent on the mountaintop near his home in Vermont.

In “Deep Economy:  the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future,” published in 2007, McKibben addresses what he sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

Other 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.
McKibben also is a frequent contributor to various magazines, including the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, the New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, Outside and National Geographic.

In late summer 2006, McKibben helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change.  In 2007 he founded stepitup07.org, which organized widely supported rallies in hundreds of American cities and towns on April 14 of last year to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050.
McKibben’s latest effort, 350.org, is an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, which he terms “the most important number on the planet.”  According to McKibben, the most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.  Pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels were less than 300 parts per million, while current levels are around 400 ppm.

A native of Lexington, Mass., McKibben is a graduate of Harvard University.  He lives in Ripton Vermont and is currently Scholar-in-Residence in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College.

Randall Roberts, Convocations coordinator (859) 985-3359