McKibben, Bill

William Ernest McKibben (born December 8, 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar of environmental studies at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign groups 350.org and the Third Act Movement. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), and Here Comes the Sun (2025) about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects. In 2009, he led 350.org's organization of 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries, as he had told a large gathering at Warren Wilson College shortly before the event. In December 2010, 350.org coordinated a planet-scale art project, with many of the 20 works visible from satellites. In 2011 and 2012 he led the environmental campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project and spent three days in jail in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later he was inducted into the literature section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013. Foreign Policy magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers in 2009 and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. In 2010, The Boston Globe called him "probably the nation's leading environmentalist" and Time magazine book reviewer Bryan Walsh described him as "the world's best green journalist". In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "mobilizing growing popular support in the USA and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change." In 2019, Aidan Smith, writing for Current Affairs, mentioned McKibbnen as a possible future Secretary of the Interior or Secretary of Energy in the cabinet of a hypothetical future progressive President.