11/14/19
NORTH ADAMS, MASS. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) announces that author, environmentalist, and activist Bill McKibben will present the Elizabeth and Lawrence Vadnais Environmental Issues Lecture on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 7 p.m., in the Campus Center gymnasium.
McKibben was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the “alternative
Nobel,” in 2014. 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, 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, 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. In 2014, biologists honored him by naming a new species
of woodland gnat — Megophthalmidia mckibbeni — in his honor.
This annual lecture series, which is named for Professor Lawrence H. Vadnais and is sponsored by the Vadnais
Endowment, is free and open to the public.
