Bill McKibben

Founder, 350.org
Movement: Climate Change

Nearly 20 years after he wrote The End of Nature (1989), the first book on climate change directed at general audiences, renowned author and environmentalist Bill McKibben realized that little had been done to address the problem of global warming. With the help of six students from Middlebury College, Bill created StepItUp07.org in 2007 to raise awareness of the ever-worsening situation. That year, the group organized 2,000 global warming protests across all 50 states. Bill and the other members of the StepItUp07 team published Fight Global Warming Now, a handbook for activists trying to organize in their communities. In 2008, Bill started 350.org, a grassroots campaign to catalyze a coordinated response to global warming. The campaign is named for the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere: 350 parts per million. Bill and 350.org are now mobilizing people on every continent to advocate for a return to this limit, encouraging worldwide demonstrations in the lead-up to the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. “Our work is structured less as an organization and more as a campaign, porous enough to let existing organizations use it for their own ends, join in easily, and help carry the message,” says Bill. “We’ve been especially successful in building networks of allies among youth and among communities of faith around the world….These are the kind of coalitions that can influence power indirectly.”

The author of a dozen books about the environment, Bill has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lyndhurst Fellowship; he won a Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is a graduate of Harvard College and a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. Bill is a former staff writer at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to various magazines, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is a board member of and contributor to Grist Magazine.

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