Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury, and the author, most recently, of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. (February 2017)

Follow Bill McKibben on Twitter: @billmckibben.

IN THE REVIEW

Everyone I know seems a little ashamed of the compulsive phone-checking, but it is, circa 2017, our species-specific calling card, as surely as the bobbing head-thrust identifies the pigeon. No one much likes spending half the workday on e-mail, but that’s what work is for many of us. Our accelerating disappearance into the digital ether now defines us—we are the mediated people, whose contact with one another and the world around us is now mostly veiled by a screen. We threaten to rebel, just as we threaten to move to Canada after an election. But we don’t; the current is too fierce to swim to shore.

The Koch Brothers’ New Brand

March 10, 2016 Issue

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer’s remarkable new book makes it abundantly clear that the Kochs, and the closely connected group of billionaires they’ve helped assemble, have distorted American politics in devastating ways, impairing the chances that we’ll effectively respond to climate change, reducing voting rights in many states, paralyzing Congress, and radically ratcheting up inequality.

The Pope and the Planet

Pope Francis visiting typhoon survivors in Tacloban, the Philippines, January 2015

August 13, 2015 Issue

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

an encyclical letter by Pope Francis

The pope’s encyclical on climate change is entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe. Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary.

NYR DAILY

Seeing Red? Think Blue

A protester celebrating President Barack Obama's decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2015

August 14, 2018

In 1980, I wrote my college newspaper endorsement of a man named Barry Commoner who was running for president. He was the candidate of the Citizens’ Party, a kind of precursor to the Greens, and since I was disgusted with both Carter and Reagan, and because he was an environmentalist well ahead of his time, I thought it made sense to back him. It made emotional sense at the time—though it’s hard for me to remember why I was so righteously indignant about poor Jimmy Carter—but it made no logical sense. Since this was a college paper, and since it was in reliably Democratic Massachusetts, it didn’t really matter—but my self-absorption did teach me a lesson I haven’t forgotten.

The Americans We Need

January 30, 2017

Over the last few years, we’ve spent considerable time in refugee enclaves across the nation. They are among the most admirable—and the most American—communities we’ve ever visited. Which is to say, President Trump’s ban on refugees is clearly racist and probably unconstitutional but it’s also just plain stupid, at least if the goal is to build a strong, safe, working nation.

Climate Change: A Warning from Islam

August 24, 2015

The real effect of documents like the recent Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, or Pope Francis’s encyclical, is less immediate policy shifts than a change in the emotional climate. It’s not necessarily that we take what the pope says as Gospel, or decide that because our university sold its fossil fuel stocks we will do likewise; it’s that these things normalize action, moving it from the category of “something that activists want” to “something obvious.” That’s the phase we’re reaching right now in the climate fight.

Pope Francis: The Cry of the Earth

Pope Francis at the Vatican, September 1, 2014

June 18, 2015

Laudato Si’, finally released this morning in Rome, is a remarkable 183-page document, incredibly rich—it’s not dense, but it is studded with aphorisms and insights. This marks the first time that a person of great authority in our global culture has fully recognized the scale and depth of our crisis, and the consequent necessary rethinking of what it means to be human.