Bill McKibben is a scholar, scientist and activist known for his influential work detailing the issue of climate change. Bill McKibben was born on December 8, 1960 in Palo Alto, California. Before he entered into high school, his family moved to Lexington, Massachusetts where he attended Lexington High School. In 1971, McKibbon’s father was arrested in an anti-Vietnam protest. McKibbon’s mother stated that the event “…had an impact on him. It taught him that you stand up for what you believe.” After graduating high school, McKibbon continued his education at Harvard University where he studied government and spent his free time as the editor of the Harvard Crimson. At Harvard, McKibbon was especially affected by the 1981 Presidential election and even interviewed Reagan for the Crimson. In 1982, after graduating from Harvard, McKibbon began work at The New Yorker and became active in activist communities in New York City. His roommate at the time, film critic Daniel Edelstein said, “He was attracted to non-violent resistance.” McKibben continued to live in New York until 1987 when he quit his job at The New Yorker and moved to the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York with his wife, Sue Halpern, a Rhodes scholar, social activist, and writer.

Soon after his move, McKibben’s life was changed when James Hansen testified to Congress about Climate Change on June 23rd, 1988. McKibbon wrote that he “was hit by the realization that the world I [he] had suddenly woken up to was just as suddenly in moral danger.” McKibben published an article in The New York Review of Books, detailing all of the reports, studies, and essays on climate change. In 1989, McKibben published his first book, The End of Nature further describing the effects of climate change in an format accessible to the public. The End of Nature is considered the first book that established the urgency and reality of climate change.

In 1992, McKibben published his second book, The Age of Misinformation. The book focuses on the media as McKibben documented a full day of cable television watching, looking at one hundred channels’ twenty four hour broadcasts. McKibben has continued to publish novels for the past twenty years, writing sixteen more novels including Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, Falter, and most recently, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon.

While writing novels, McKibben accepted the position as a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. He has guided students in both academic and social activist pursuits, organizing rallies, marches, and boycotts. In 2006, McKibben arranged a five day march across Vermot, protesting for Vermont politicians to reduce the state’s increasing carbon emissions. A year later, he led another rally with students in an effort to force congress to use legislation to decrease national carbon emissions.