Bill McKibben, a journalist and writer on environmental issues who lectured at Hamilton College in 2001, will return to Hamilton for a lecture on Friday, April 4, at 4:10 p.m. in the Kirner-Johnson auditorium. His talk is titled "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," based on his forthcoming book of the same title. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Philosophy department.
McKibben is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and is currently a visiting scholar at Middlebury College. His most famous book, The End of Nature, was a best seller in the early 1990s and sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming; the decade of science since has proved his prescience. His other books include Maybe One, in which he took on the most controversial of environmental problems – population. McKibben has also written Hope, Human, and Wild, a book documenting the progress that has been made on environmental issues, and The Age of Missing Information. Now in Hundred Dollar Holiday he makes a case for a more joyful Christmas. McKibben contends we can have a far more meaningful and satisfying holiday by sharply reducing the amount of money we spend on it.
Prior to his arrival at Middlebury, he was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, and the winner of the 2000 Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing. McKibben holds honorary doctorates from several institutions and received a Bicentennial medal from Middlebury College in the fall of 2000.
McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside and The New York Times. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where he is a Sunday school superintendent of the local Methodist church.
