Environmentalist Bill McKibben to Speak at Williams College on April 20

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 12, 2017—Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben will join Williams College during Earth Week to discuss his work and the climate change movement. His talk, “Outside the Comfort Zone: Working for Change on an Overheated Planet,” will be held at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 20, in Bronfman Auditorium. Entrance will be limited to those with Williams IDs. Open seats will be released to the general public after 7:50 p.m., space permitting. The talk will be live-streamed in Paresky Auditorium and Wege Auditorium and will be recorded for uploading onto Williams YouTube. The live stream will also be available via a link on the Confronting Climate Change programming page (https://sustainability.williams.edu/ccc/programming).

Once described by The Boston Globe as “probably America’s most important environmentalist,” Bill McKibben is a Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and founder of 350.org. Launched in 2008, 350.org is the first planet-wide grassroots climate change movement and anti-carbon campaign that coordinated 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries in October 2009. He has organized a nationwide resistance movement to the Keystone Pipeline and a fast-growing push for fossil fuel divestment.

McKibben’s 1989 book The End of Nature (Random House, 1989) is considered to be the first book about climate change to reach a mass audience and has been published in 24 languages. His most recent book is Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (Times Books 2013), in which he recounts his personal experiences and the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet. McKibben started his career as a staff writer for The New Yorker, and his writing has been featured in a variety of publications around the world, including National Geographic and Rolling Stone. He has received numerous awards including the 2013 Gandhi Prize, the Thomas Merton Prize, and in 2009 he was named as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Most Important Global Thinkers. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University.

This event is sponsored by the Class of 1946 Memorial Lecture Fund for World Brotherhood, the Class of 1946 Sustainability Fund, the Center for Environmental Studies, and the Zhilkha Center for Environment Initiatives and is part of a thematic year of inquiry called “Confronting Climate Change.” Throughout this academic year the college will host a series of speakers, events, and programming planned to shed light on the issue of climate change and how we should respond to it as individuals, as an institution, as a nation, and as a member of the global community.

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For building locations on the Williams campus, please consult the map outside the driveway entrance to the Security Office located in Hopkins Hall on Main Street (Rte. 2), next to the Thompson Memorial Chapel, or call the Office of Communications (413) 597-4277. The map can also be found on the web at www.williams.edu/map

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