When it comes to the climate crisis, author and environmentalist Bill McKibben hasn’t been a fully “objective journalist” since he finished penning his first book, The End of Nature, over three decades ago, and realized he didn’t want the world to burn up. While McKibben continues to write on the subjects of climate and the environment for publications like The New Yorker, The Nation, and the Bulletin, in recent years his attentions and energies have been at least equally spent on climate activism. The organization that McKibben and others founded in 2008, 350.org, is now a vast operation that has affiliations with some 300 other climate organizations around the world.
Earlier this year, McKibben founded a new group for Americans over the age of 60 called Third Act and started a Substack newsletter called The Crucial Years. In an interview with Bulletin associate editor Jessica McKenzie, McKibben discusses these new endeavors, when he realized the fight over climate was more about money and power than science and evidence, the technological shifts that make climate action easier now than 10 years ago, and which environmental crisis McKibben believes is underappreciated by the general public.
Jessica S. McKenzie 