Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who writes frequently about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history.

Random House published his first book, The End of Nature, in 1989 after it was serialized in The New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and it has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have been published in the United States, including an updated version in 2006.

McKibben's next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment in which he taped a single-day output of the 100 channels of cable TV on the Fairfax, Va., system (at that time one of the nation's largest). He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and it was reissued in a new edition in 2006.

His subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth, about Curitiba, Brazil, and Kerala, India -- places that illustrate how communities can be self-supporting and can improve and expand standards of living without immense spending projects; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, concerning a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; Enough: Staying Human in an Endangered Age, focusing on what the author sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks, about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vt., back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks.

His most recent book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, was published in March 2007, and it addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In late summer 2006, McKibben helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action about global warming, which some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007, he founded Stepitup 2007 to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With the help of six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America and gained the support of environmental, student and religious groups. A guidebook, Fight Global Warming Now, will be published in October 2007 and is drawn from the Stepitup experience. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.