Bill McKibben
American environmentalist and writer

William Ernest McKibben (born December 8, 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar of environmental studies at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign groups 350.org and the Third Act Movement. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), and Here Comes the Sun (2025) about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.
In 2009, he led 350.org's organization of 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. In 2010, McKibben and 350.org conceived the 10/10/10 Global Work Party, which convened more than 7,000 events in 188 countries, as he had told a large gathering at Warren Wilson College shortly before the event. In December 2010, 350.org coordinated a planet-scale art project, with many of the 20 works visible from satellites. In 2011 and 2012 he led the environmental campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project and spent three days in jail in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later he was inducted into the literature section of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013. Foreign Policy magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers in 2009 and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009.
“Bill McKibben” enters the record as american environmentalist and writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bill, McKibben and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q503815. VIAF identifies the subject as 24639738. The Library of Congress control number is n88207642. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1989, 2019 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill McKibben” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.