Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer who frequently writes about global warming and alternative energy and advocates for more localized economies. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. In 2009 he led the organization of 350.org, which coordinated what Foreign Policy magazine called "the largest ever global coordinated rally of any kind," with 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature. Al Gore wrote in 2007 that "when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben’s descriptions of the planetary impacts... made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title 'Ozone Man' from the first President Bush.”
McKibben grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. Immediately after college he joined the The New Yorker as a staff writer and wrote much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
He currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and their only daughter, Sophie (born 1993 in Ripton, Vermont). He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. He is also a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.
