Summary
Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a common audience about global warming. He is a co-founder and Senior Advisor at 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world.
Quick Links
Upcoming Appearances and Events (on billmckibben.com)
Editorials, Op-Eds, and Interviews
Bill McKibben is founder and senior adviser emeritus of 350.org. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write many more books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and has organized on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $15 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat— Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.
Photo Credit: Nancie Battaglia. Click here for a high-res version of this image
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Photo Credit: Nancie Battaglia. Click here for a high-res version of this image
For each installment of Bill’s The Climate Crisis series in The New Yorker, click here.
- June 3, 2020, The New Yorker, “If Trump Goes Even Lower, We’d Better Be Prepared”
- Apr 22, 2020, The Guardian, “This Earth Day, we must stop the fossil fuel money pipeline”
- Sept 17, 2019, The New Yorker, “Money is the Oxygen on Which The Fire of Global Warming Burns”
- Sept 12, 2019, TIME Magazine, “Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different”
- August 14, 2018, The New York Review of Books, “Seeing Red? Think Blue”
- March 5, 2018, The Nation, “3 Strategies to Get to a Fossil-Free America”
- June 26, 2017, The New Yorker, “The Race to Solar-Power Africa”
- January 24, 2017, Rolling Stone, “The New Battle Plan for the Planet’s Climate Crisis”
- November 30, 2016, The Nation, “How the Active Many Can Overcome the Ruthless Few”
- August 15, 2016, Bill McKibben, The New Republic, “A World At War”
- March 23, 2016, Bill McKibben, The Nation, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry”
- October 20, 2015, Bill McKibben, The Nation, “Exxon Knew Everything There Was to Know About Climate Change by the Mid-1980s – and Denied It”
- June 29, 2015, Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, “Power to the People”
- May 21, 2014, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “A Call to Arms: An Invitation to Demand Action on Climate Change“
- Aug 18, 2013, Bill McKibben, TomDispatch, “Movements Without Leaders“
- Mar 1, 2013, Bill McKibben, Orion Magazine, “A Moral Atmosphere”
- July 19, 2012, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math“
- Sept 28, 2011, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, “The Keystone Pipeline Revolt: Why Mass Arrests are Just the Beginning“
Selected Interviews and Media
60 Minutes / CBS: What Will Be The New Normal After the Coronavirus Pandemic? May 2020.
Amanpour & Co / PBS: Bill McKibben Discusses Fossil Fuel Divestment. March 2020.
Bioneers: What We’ve Learned About Climate Change in the Last 30 Years. Nov 2019.
Democracy Now!: Youth Who Led Global Climate Strike Are Bringing a New “Spirit” to Climate Fight. Sept 2019.
NPR.org: Climate Change Is ‘Greatest Challenge Humans Have Ever Faced,’ Author Says. April 2019.
Amanpour & Co / CNN: Bill McKibben: We have wasted the last 30 years. April 2019.
CBS News: Bill McKibben on how extreme weather is shrinking the planet. Nov 2018.
350.org: Climate Teach-ins with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mustafa Ali, James Hansen, Katherine Hayhoe, and Bill McKibben. #1: Science. #2: Solutions. April 2017.
Plough Publishing: Bill McKibben on how to build a strong community. March 2015.
Feb 7, 2014, Bill Moyers: Bill McKibben to Obama: Say No to Big Oil
Feb 13, 2012, Colbert Report: The Keystone XL Oil Pipeline