Bill McKibben

2009-10-21T22:41:07Z

99.155.145.157: Category:Action on climate change

{{Infobox Writer 
| name = Bill McKibben
| image = Bill McKibben at RIT-3.jpg
| imagesize =
| caption = Bill McKibben speaking at Rochester Institute of Technology
| pseudonym =
| birthname = Bill McKibben
| birthdate = 1960
| birthplace = Palo Alto, California
| deathdate =
| deathplace =
| occupation = Environmentalist and writer
| nationality =
| ethnicity =
| citizenship =
| education =
| alma_mater =
| period =
| genre = global warming, alternative energy, risks associated with [[human genetic engineering]]
| subject =
| movement =
| notableworks =
| spouse = Sue Halpern
| partner =
| children = one daughter, Sophie
| relatives =
| influences =
| influenced =
| awards =
| signature =
| website = http://www.billmckibben.com
| portaldisp =
}}

'''Bill McKibben''' (born [[1960]]<ref>http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/People/bill_mckibben.html</ref>) is an [[United States|American]] [[environmentalist]] and writer who frequently writes about [[global warming]] and [[alternative energy]] and advocates for more localized economies. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history.<ref>{{citeweb|title=Growing Local, Eating Local|url=http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/344/|publisher=''[[PBS]]''|accessdate=2008-09-28}}</ref> McKibben is active in the [[methodism|Methodist Church]], and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature. [[Al Gore]] wrote in 2007 that "when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben’s descriptions of the planetary impacts... made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title 'Ozone Man' from the [[George H. W. Bush|first President Bush]].”

McKibben grew up in suburban [[Lexington, Massachusetts|Lexington]], [[Massachusetts]]. As an undergraduate at [[Harvard University]], he was president of the ''[[Harvard Crimson]]'' newspaper. Immediately after college he joined the ''[[The New Yorker]]'' as a staff writer and wrote much of the ''Talk of the Town'' column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor [[William Shawn]] was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the [[Adirondack Mountains]] of upstate [[New York]].

He currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in [[Ripton]], [[Vermont]]. He is a scholar in residence at [[Middlebury College]], where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. He is also a fellow at the [[Post Carbon Institute]].

==Writing==
McKibben is a frequent contributor to various magazines including ''[[The New York Times]]'', ''[[Atlantic Monthly|The Atlantic Monthly]]'', ''[[Harper's]]'', ''[[Orion magazine]]'', ''[[Mother Jones (magazine)|Mother Jones]]'', ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', ''[[The Middlebury Campus]]'', ''[[Granta]]'', ''The National Geographic,'' ''[[Rolling Stone]]'', and ''[[Outside (magazine)|Outside]]''. He is also a board member at and contributor to ''[[Grist Magazine]]''.

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

His next book, ''The Age of Missing Information'', was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment in which McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the [[Fairfax, Virginia]], system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. 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 was reissued in a new edition in 2006.

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'', which is about the [[Book of Job]] and the environment; ''Maybe One'', about human population; ''Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously'', about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; and ''Enough'', about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering and nanotechnology.

''Wandering Home'', is about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of [[Lake Champlain]] in [[Ripton, Vermont|Ripton]], [[Vermont]] back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks. His book, ''[[Deep Economy|Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future]]'', published in March 2007, was a national bestseller. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In the fall of 2007 he published, with the other members of his Step It Up team, ''Fight Global Warming Now'', a handbook for activists trying to organize their local communities. In 2008 came ''The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life'', a collection of essays spanning his career. ''Publishers Weekly'', in its review, said "Collected here are 44 trenchant essays written for various publications over the past 25 years by an astute observer of contemporary life and the environment. ... “There are all sorts of sweet things in this world,” McKibben writes, “many of which are us, and many of which are not.” Thankfully, McKibben has borne witness to them with grace and style."

Also in 2008, the Library of America published "American Earth," an anthology of American environmental writing since Thoreau edited by McKibben.

==Awards==
McKibben has been awarded both a [[Guggenheim Fellowship]] (1993) and a Lyndhurst Fellowship. He won a [[Lannan Literary Awards#Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction|Lannan Literary Award]] for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from [[Sterling College (Vermont)|Sterling College]], [[Green Mountain College]], [[Unity College (Maine)|Unity College]], the State University of New York, Colgate University, and [[Lebanon Valley College]].

==Step It Up==
'''Step It Up 2007''' is a nationwide [[grassroots]] [[Environmentalism|environmental]] campaign started by McKibben to demand action on [[global warming]] by the [[U.S. Congress]].

In late summer 2006 he helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to call for action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007, he founded Step It Up 2007, which organized rallies in hundreds of American cities and towns on [[April 14]], [[2007]] to demand that Congress enact curbs on [[carbon emissions]] by 80 percent by [[2050]]. The campaign quickly won widespread support from a wide variety of environmental, student, and religious groups.

In August 2007 McKibben announced Step It Up 2, to take place [[November 3]], [[2007]]. In addition to the 80% by 2050 slogan from the first campaign, the second adds "10% [reduction of emissions] in three years (''"Hit the Ground Running"''), a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, and a ''Green Jobs Corps'' to help fix homes and businesses so those targets can be met" (called ''"Green Jobs Now, and No New Coal"'').<ref>http://www.stepitup2007.org/#letter</ref>

==350.org==
{{Main|350.org}}
In the wake of Step It Up's achievements, the same team announced a new campaign in March 2008 called [[350.org]]. The organizing effort, aimed at the entire globe, drew its name from climate scientist [[James Hansen]]'s contention earlier that winter that any atmospheric concentration of [[carbon dioxide]] (CO<sub>2</sub>) above 350 parts per million was unsafe. "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO<sub>2</sub> will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that." Hansen et al. stated in the Abstract to their paper.<ref>Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, D. Beerling, R. Berner, V. Masson-Delmotte, M. Pagani, M. Raymo, D.L. Royer, and J.C. Zachos, 2008: Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim? Open Atmos. Sci. J., 2, 217-231, doi:10.2174/1874282300802010217. [http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html]</ref>

350.org, which has offices and organizers in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, attempts to spread that 350 number in advance of international climate meetings set for December 2009 in Copenhagen. It has been widely covered in the media.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/science/earth/01treaty.html?hp</ref>

==Bibliography==
===Books===
*''The End of Nature'' (1990) ISBN 0-385-41604-0
*''The Age of Missing Information'' (1992) ISBN 0-394-58933-5, challenges [[Marshall McLuhan]]'s "global village" ideal and claims the standardization of life in electronic media is that of image and not substance, resulting in a loss of meaningful content in society
* ''Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth'' (1995) ISBN 0-316-56064-2
*''Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families'' (1998) ISBN 0-684-85281-0
*''Hundred Dollar Holiday'' (1998) ISBN 0-684-85595-X
* ''Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously'' (2001) ISBN 0-452-28270-5
*''Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age'' (2003) ISBN 0-8050-7096-6
*''Wandering Home'' (2005) ISBN 0-609-61073-2
* ''The Comforting Whirlwind : God, Job, and the Scale of Creation'' (2005) ISBN 1-56101-234-3
* ''Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future'' (2007) ISBN 0-8050-7626-3
** Reviewed in [[Tim Flannery]], "We're Living on Corn!" ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'' 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 26-28
* ''Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community'' (2007)
* ''The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces from an Active Life'' (2008)
* ''American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau'' (edited) (2008)

===Articles===
* {{cite journal |last=McKibben |first=Bill |year=1985 |month=January |day=7 |title=The Talk of the Town: An American Dilemma |journal=[[The New Yorker]] |volume= 60|issue=47 |pages=21 }} Renaming of [[Sixth Avenue (Manhattan)|Sixth Avenue]] in [[Manhattan]] as 'Avenue of the Americas'.
* {{cite journal |last=McKibben |first=Bill |year=1985 |month=January |day=14 |title=The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment |journal=[[The New Yorker]] |volume= 60|issue=48 |pages=23 }} Friend whose prior military rank was inadvertently promoted by [[Geraldine Ferraro]].
* {{cite journal |last=McKibben |first=Bill |year=1985 |month=January |day=14 |title=The Talk of the Town: Flowers |journal=[[The New Yorker]] |volume= 60|issue=48 |pages=28}} Textile designers [[Leslie Tillett]] and [[Brian Goodin]].
* {{cite journal |last=McKibben |first=Bill |year=1985 |month=January |day=28 |title=The Talk of the Town: Up Front |journal=[[The New Yorker]] |volume= 60|issue=50 |pages=22-23}} [[Rolls-Royce (car)|Rolls Royce]] grille designer Tony Kent.

==See also==
*[[Transhumanism#Trivialization of human identity (Enough argument)|''Enough'' argument]] - the argument based on McKibben's writings which insists that if advanced technology allows us to change the context of our human lives, that those lives may thereby become meaningless because there will be no objective values by which to measure worth.
* [[Green economics]]
* [[Future energy development]]
* [[1sky]]

==References==
{{More footnotes|[[WP:BLP|biography of a living person]]|date=August 2009}}
{{reflist|2}}

==External links==
{{wikiquote}}
* [http://www.stepitup2007.org Step It Up 2007]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/nyregion/15warming.html?ex=1187409600&en=ca957de96cd53437&ei=5070 New York Times: For the Environment, Rallies Great and Small]
* [http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1442865220070414 Reuters: Global Warming Activists Urge Emissions Cuts]
* [http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/20070413_Rallying_the_citizens_in_support_of_Earth.html Philadelphia Inquirer: Rallying the masses in support of the Earth Big buzz builds for Step It Up, a nationwide global-warming event] (broken link?)
* [http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/13/1421235 Democracy Now: Thousands Gather this Weekend for Largest Ever-Rally Against Global Warming]
* [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/03/19/early_critic_of_warming_steps_up_activist_role/?page=1 The Boston Globe: Early critic of warming steps up activist role]
*[http://www.mersinim.net/ Mersin]
*[http://www.elephantjournal.com/2008/04/bill-mckibben-2/ "Too Little Too Late?"] Video Interview with Bill McKibben
*Is More Better? Rethinking Consumption at ''Inner Compass''
**[http://www.calvin.edu/innercompass/media/ic817.mov Video interview] (.mov file)
**[http://www.calvin.edu/innercompass/media/ic817.mp3 Audio of interview] (.mp3 file)
*[http://www.elephantjournal.com/2007/05/bill-mckibben/ On the Importance of Local Economies] video interview
*[http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tturb/00154/trb-00154.html Author papers at Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, Texas Tech University]
*[http://www.alternet.org/columnists/1981/ Bill McKibben] at [[AlterNet]]
*[http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200311/interview.asp "We Are Plenty Good Enough"] - Bill McKibben on brash plans to tinker with our genes. Interview by Jennifer Hattam.
*[http://www.assumption.edu/users/ady/Media/mckibben.html Bill McKibben article collection]
*[http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=20140 Lecture at DePauw University, October 4, 2007]
*[http://www.reason.com/0310/cr.rb.enough.shtml "Enough Already: A leading environmentalist makes a foolish case against technological innovation"] by Ronald Bailey, ''[[Reason (magazine)|Reason]]''
*McKibben's presentation during [http://sss.stanford.edu/ The Singularity Summit at Stanford] in May 2006, which relates his ''Enough'' argument
** [http://sss.stanford.edu/coverage/audioandvideo/ Video of presentation]
** [http://sss.stanford.edu/sss-audio/mckibben.mp3 Audio of presentation] (.mp3)
* [http://www.jancannonfilms.com/climatechange.htm Link to film documenting Bill McKibben's Labor Day, 2006, Vermont climate change march]
*[http://www.writersvoice.net/2007/05/podcast-mckibben-david/ Interview on Writer's Voice] with radio host Francesca Rheannon.
* [http://www.themonthly.com.au/tm/node/709 'Eco-Worriers] Review of ''Deep Economy'' by [[Robyn Davidson]] , ''[[The Monthly]]''
*[http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/2286.html/ Review of DEEP ECONOMY] by Francesca Rheannon on [http://www.socialfunds.com/ SocialFunds.com].
* [http://www.eenews.net/tv/video_guide/794?page=1&sort_type=date McKibben assesses current state of environmentalism, urges local consumerism], E&E TV, 1 May 2008
* [http://makesomethinghappen.net/2008/06/04/166/ McKibben on Make Something Happen]
* [http://windmt.com/pages/billm_remarks.html Audio recording (mp3): Bill McKibben] discusses literature, climate change, environmental activism and 350.org, in speech given at the invitation of the Wallace Stegner Center.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mackibben, Bill}}
[[Category:American environmentalists]]
[[Category:American Methodists]]
[[Category:American non-fiction environmental writers]]
[[Category:Harvard University alumni]]
[[Category:Middlebury College faculty]]
[[Category:New Yorker staff writers]]
[[Category:The New Yorker people]]
[[Category:Ripton, Vermont]]
[[Category:Writers from Vermont]]
[[Category:1960 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Climate change environmentalists]]
[[Category:Action on climate change]]
[[Category:Global Campaign for Climate Action]]

Wikipedia - Benutzerbeiträge [de]

Bill McKibben