Arts, Dining & Entertainment

Author and activist Bill McKibben speaks at GMC

Monday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. — POULTNEY — Bill McKibben, author, educator, environmentalist, and founder of 350.org, will be on the Green Mountain College campus on Monday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. to deliver a public talk “Life on the Border: Vermont, New York and the Future” in Ackley Auditorium. The address is free and open to the public.

McKibben is the author of the book “Wandering Home,” summer reading for first-year students in the college’s Images of Nature classes. The book examines McKibben’s current (Vermont) and former (New York’s Adirondack region) homes and reflects on the hopeful signs he finds in both places. In Vermont he visits with friends trying to sustain traditional ways of living on the land and inventing new ones. After crossing Lake Champlain in a rowboat, he backpacks south for ten days through the Adirondack woods, contemplating the questions that he began to raise in his book “The End of Nature:” What constitutes the natural? How much human intervention can a place stand before it loses its essence? What does it mean for a place to be truly wild? 

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 its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe calls him “probably America’s most important environmentalist.” 

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