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 co-founder of the grassroots climate organization 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.” The Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
McKibben grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. After graduating from Harvard, he joined the The New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the “Talk of the Town” column from 1982 to early 1987.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in The New Yorker. 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, about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; and Wandering Home 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.
In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise. His most recent book is Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.
McKibben currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, in Ripton, Vermont.
