Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him ‘the planet’s best green journalist’ and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was ‘probably the country’s most important environmentalist.’ Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges.

Bill was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote there from 1982 to early 1987.

Between 1989 and 2007 Bill published 9 books on topics ranging from human population to genetic engineering to the role of media in our lives.

Beginning in January 2007 Bill founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. In October of 2009 Bill and 350.org organized the International Day of Climate Action. People from 181 countries organized 5,200 simultaneous rallies, making it what CNN called the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”

Bill 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, and Outside.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie in Ripton, Vermont.

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