Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist who frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. McKibben's writing often has a spiritual bent, which is not surprising as he is active in the Methodist Church.

He grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He currently lives in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont with his wife, writer Sue Halpern. He is a visiting scholar at Middlebury College.

McKibben is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

Quotes

...They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.
—Enough, p.198

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
—Enough, p.199

Books

• The Comforting Whirlwind : God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005) ISBN 1561012343
• Wandering Home (2005) ISBN 0609610732
• Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003) ISBN 0805070966
• Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously (2001) ISBN 0452282705
• Hundred Dollar Holiday (1998) ISBN 068485595X
• Maybe One (1998) ISBN 0684852810
• Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995) ISBN 0316560642
• The Age of Missing Information (1992) ISBN 0394589335 - challenges Marshall McLuhan's "global village" ideal and claims the standardization of life in electronic media is that of image and not substance, resulting in a loss of meaningful content in society
• The End of Nature (1990) ISBN 0385416040

See also

• Enough argument

External links

• Bill McKibben.com - official web site
• "We Are Plenty Good Enough" - Bill McKibben on brash plans to tinker with our genes. Interview by Jennifer Hattam
• Bill McKibben article collection
• "Enough Already: A leading environmentalist makes a foolish case against technological innovation" by Ronald Bailey, Reason
• Bill McKibben's thoughts on Earth Day 2006

American environmentalists | Ripton, Vermont