Noted environmentalist, author and activist Bill McKibben will speak Monday, April 17, at 5:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
His talk, “The Adirondacks: Refuge in a Warming World?” is part of the Kelly Adirondack Center’s lecture series “Living with the Land.” It is free and open to the public. Seating is limited; the talk will be streamed to an overflow space in Reamer Auditorium.
McKibben has written extensively on global warming, genetic engineering, religion, the effects of television on culture and knowledge, and the Eastern United States and Adirondack wilderness.
In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel.’
Environmentalist Bill McKibben
His 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” was the first general audience book about climate change. It has appeared in 24 languages. He’s authored a dozen more books, including “Wandering Home,” which chronicles his foot travels across Vermont, and “Age of Missing Information” (a 2006 reissue of a 1992 book), in which he compares his experience watching 1,700 hours of cable TV to that of contemplating nature in the Adirondacks.
He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized 20,000 rallies around the world, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, McKibben was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize. He holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities.
Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”
A former staff writer for the New Yorker, McKibben is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic and Rolling Stone.
He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern. In 2014, biologists honored him by naming a new species of woodland gnat -Megophthalmidia mckibbeni -in his honor.
To learn more, visit his website.