Climate Calling 2026

About the Speaker

Bill McKibben was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the “alternative Nobel.” His book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been translated into 24 languages. TIME Magazine called him “perhaps the planet’s best green journalist,” and he’s lectured and organized on every continent, including Antarctica. His recent books include The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, an investigation of our tumultuous past and a roadmap towards a better future, and the New York Times bestseller Falter, which offers a piercing look not only at our environmental challenges, but at the existential questions that come with new technologies like artificial intelligence.​ The LA Review of Books says “McKibben in Falter once more explains nature’s workings, asks profound questions, and tells wonderful stories,” calling it “a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one.”

“Probably America’s most important environmentalist.”
— The Boston Globe

In his heartfelt, hopeful talks, McKibben offers realistic approaches to saving our planet, as individuals, of course, but also as thoughtful members of a mobilized group. When it comes to building a movement, we should consider “being a little bit less of an individual,” he says.  Together, we can create “the right kind of pressure” to make change, like getting college campuses to divest from fossil fuels. He also explores the environmental possibilities of technology, like the use of solar panels across Africa. Audiences are uplifted by McKibben’s stories of people all over the world engaged in making the planet a more environmentally just, sustainable place. His talks “give people a sense that even in their deep worry—they are not alone,” he says.

McKibben’s writing has earned him numerous awards, including membership in the Literature section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John Steinbeck prize. The author of fifteen books, in recent years he’s written authoritative pieces on renewable energy in Africa for The New Yorker and on the fossil fuel industry for Rolling Stone.  The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, McKibben 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. In 2014, biologists named a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni—in his honor.