Originally recorded on August 15, 2019.

Bill McKibben is an author, environmentalist and co-founder of anti-carbon campaign group 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.

McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including 1989’s The End of Nature, regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. Currently, McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes referred to as the “alternative Nobel.” Other honors and awards include Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships; a Lannan Literary Award; a Gandhi Peace Award; a Thomas Merton Prize; a John Muir Award; and the Sam Rose and Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson College. In accepting that prize, he told the graduating Dickinson students that global climate change is the greatest challenge that has ever confronted human society.

A former staff writer for The New Yorker, McKibben writes frequently for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. In 2014, biologists honored him by naming a new species of woodland gnat — Megophthalmidia mckibbeni — in his honor.

About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.