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16th - Bill McKibben - Down to the Wire: A Hot Fight in a Hot World

Event Type
Guest Lecture
Speaker
Bill McKibben
Sponsor
Center for Sustainable Systems
School for Environment and Sustainability
LSA
Details
October 5, 20175:00pm - 6:30pm
 - 
Hill Auditorium

About Bill McKibben

The 2017 Wege Lecture featured renowned author, environmentalist, and activist, Bill McKibben, who delivered a talk titled Down to the Wire: A Hot Fight in a Hot World.

Mr. McKibben has written extensively about climate change throughout his career and is the founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide grassroots climate change movement. Bill McKibben, an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the "alternative Nobel." His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.

The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”

A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists honored him by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni—in his honor.

About the Lecture

Watch the recorded talk:

 

This program was presented in partnership with MC²: Michigan & the Climate Crisis in conjunction with the Bicentennial LSA Theme Semester with support from: Science for the People, Office of the Provost; School for Environment and Sustainability; College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Bicentennial Office; College of Engineering, Rackham School for Graduate Studies; Center for the Study of Complex Systems; Center for Sustainable Systems; Institute for the Humanities; Ross School of Business; Joseph A. Labadie Collection; LSA Honors Program; Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; American Culture; Chemistry; Communication Studies; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Ecological and Evolutionary Biology; Ford School of Public Policy; Graham Institute; History; Museum of Natural History; Physics; Program in Science, Technology, and Society; Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies; Anthropology; Asian Languages and Cultures; English Language and Literature; and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.