Bill McKibben (b. 1960)
American environmentalist and nature writer. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, McKibben attended Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. He then worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker, which serialized his first book, The End of Nature (1989), an introduction to climate change and a plea for a reformed attitude to nature. Since then he has written about a broad array of environmental topics, earning him Time magazine’s description as “the world’s best green journalist.” McKibben’s books include Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995); The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005); Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), an attempt to envision a more localized and more sustainable economic system; and most recently the best-selling Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010), about the inevitability of climate change. See also billmckibben.com.