Bill McKibben, best-selling author, environmentalist: "The Education of an Unlikely Activist" April 8

Bill McKibben, environmental scholar, activist and best-selling author, will present "The Education of An Unlikely Activist" at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 8, in Hall Auditorium. His is the final lecture in the Miami University Humanities Center’s 2014-2015 Altman Program.

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Bill McKibben, the "unlikely activist," will speak April 8.

This year’s Altman Program topic, “The Anthropocene: A New Era in Human-Environment Relations,” explores the pressing challenges of an age in which human activity has overtaken natural geological processes.

McKibben is founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009.  In 2014 Mckibben and 350.org were awarded the international Right Livelihood Award.

He is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change and has appeared in 24 languages.

He is 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 Peace Award and the Thomas Merton Award, and he holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities.

Foreign Policy magazine 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, McKibben writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including The New York Review of BooksNational Geographic, and Rolling StoneHe is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000.

McKibben — the "unlikely activist" — spent three days in jail in the summer of 2011 after leading the largest act of civil disobedience in 30 years to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. President Barack Obama recently vetoed the pipeline.

The lecture is sponsored by the Humanities Center; media, journalism, and film; student affairs; liberal education; and the College of Arts and Science. 

The Altman Program symposium on "Interrogating the Anthropocene" will be held April 9-10. All events April 9 are free and open to the public;  no registration is required.