New Releases by Bill McKibben

Award-winning environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in the previous year. “This was the most anomalous year (so far) in human history,” guest editor Bill McKibben writes, “the year in which the relationship between people and planet showed its most dramatic signs yet of unraveling.” The selections in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 reveal a trying year for our planet—from the Lahaina wildfire tragedy to the lush Amazon jungle slowly turning to savanna—while also celebrating the earth’s beautiful and mysterious ways—from the largest beaver dam on earth to the heroic innovation to prevent birds from crashing into Chicago’s expanse of glass buildings. These essays offer solace in trying times, showing a way for a better future. They are, as McKibben says, “a reminder that this world is still a lovely and deep place, well worth the fighting for.” The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 includes IAN FRAZIER • AMANDA GEFTER • DOUGLAS FOX • SARAH KAPLAN • BEN GOLDFARB • RAYMOND ZHONG • ALEX CUADROS • AND OTHERS

One of the New Yorker''s Best Books of 2022 Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.” Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. And he is curious: What the hell happened? In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

From environmentalist and bestselling author Bill McKibben comes a hopeful, inspiring picture book celebrating the power of human cooperation and the beauty of life on Earth, beautifully illustrated by artist Stevie Lewis. When we work together, we humans can do incredible things. We share the responsibility to address climate change and our changing planet. It is critical that we act collectively to protect our beautiful, fragile world. Renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben and the incredibly talented artist Stevie Lewis team up to bring this gorgeous picture book to life. Celebrating the amazing things people can do, it’s an inspiring message of hope.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. An Idea Can Go Extinct is Bill McKibben''s impassioned, groundbreaking account of how, by changing the earth''s entire atmosphere, the weather and the most basic forces around us, ''we are ending nature.'' Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

Im Jahr 1989 warnte Bill McKibben mit seinem Buch »Das Ende der Natur« als einer der ersten vor dem Klimawandel. Sein neuer Aufruf ist umso dringender und weitreichender – die Menschheit ist dabei, nicht weniger als ihr Fortbestehen aufs Spiel zu setzen. Der Klimawandel ist heute, so McKibben, ein Hebel, der unsere Welt von Grund auf verändert. Die konzentrierte wirtschaftliche Macht in den Händen einiger weniger Spieler ist ein weiterer. Genauso die radikalen Konsequenzen der modernen Genetik sowie das Streben der Tech-Mogule nach künstlicher Intelligenz, das nach dem Sinn menschlichen Daseins gar nicht mehr fragt. In »Die taumelnde Welt« tritt Bill McKibben einen großen Schritt zurück, um dieses gesamte »Spiel der Menschheit« zu betrachten: Welchen Lauf nimmt es, wer macht die Regeln, und wie wollen wir es in Zukunft spielen?

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

Presents an anthology of the best science and nature writing published in the previous year, selected from American periodicals.

"As the host of Radio Free Vermont--''underground, underpowered, and underfoot''--seventy-two-year-old Vern Barclay is currently broadcasting from an ''undisclosed and double-secret location.'' With the help of a young computer prodigy named Perry Alterson, Vern uses his radio show to advocate for a simple yet radical idea: an independent Vermont, one where the state secedes from the United States and operates under a free local economy. But for now, he and his radio show must remain untraceable, because in addition to being a lifelong Vermonter and concerned citizen, Vern Barclay is also a fugitive from the law"--

It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world''s poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman--a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. The title of this book is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few--hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent. If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the author proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.

This issue of Plough Quarterly explores our relationship with the natural world. Hear from leading scientists, farmers, writers, activists, theologians, and artists who have set their hearts and minds and hands to caring for the earth for generations to come. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, fiction, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus'' message into practice and find common cause with others.

Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben recounts the personal and global story of the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet. Bill McKibben is not a person you''d expect to find hand - cuffed in the city jail in Washington, D.C. But that''s where he spent three days in the summer of 2011, after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. A few months later the protesters would see their efforts rewarded when President Obama agreed to put the project on hold. And yet McKibben realized that this small and temporary victory was at best a stepping - stone. With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Hurricane Sandy scouring the Atlantic, the need for much deeper solutions was obvious. Some of those would come at the local level, and McKibben recounts a year he spends in the company of a beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil - fuel industry as a whole. Oil and Honey is McKibben''s account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight - from the absolute centre of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small - scale local answers to the climate crisis. With characteristic empathy and passion, he reveals the imperative to work on both levels, telling the story of raising one year''s honey crop and building a social movement that''s still cresting.

Erv Schroeder''s photographs bear witness to the primordial forces of the earth--the raw power that moved and shifted huge hunks of rock to form natural stone sculptures.

“A marvelous writer who has thought deeply about the environment, loves this part of the country, and knows how to be a first-class traveling companion.” —Entertainment Weekly In Wandering Home, one of his most personal books, New York Times–bestselling author Bill McKibben invites readers to join him on a hike from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. Here he reveals that the motivation for his impassioned environmental activism is not high-minded or abstract, but as tangible as the lakes and forests he explored in his twenties, the same woods where he lives with his family today. Over the course of his journey McKibben meets with old friends and kindred spirits, including activists, writers, organic farmers, a vintner, a beekeeper, and environmental studies students, all in touch with nature and committed to its preservation. For McKibben, there is no better place than these woods to work out a balance between the wild and the cultivated, the individual and the global community, and to discover the answers to the challenges facing our planet today. “A short, lovely chronicle of a long hike, during which McKibben meditatively reflects on the relationship between nature and humanity. Nature writing at its best.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “An enamoring and discerning look at one man’s compiled thoughts and researched knowledge on the Adirondacks as he strolls through its dense forests.” —All Points North “[McKibben] writes with his usual wry, approachable power about the Adirondacks, his chosen home . . . The book could single-handedly spur a rush of tourism to the Adirondack area—it’s that good.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Van Jones, Al Gore, Elizabeth Kolbert, Naomi Klein, and other essential voices on global warming, from its 19th-century discovery to the present, in a volume edited by Bill McKibben, our most widely respected environmental writer With the rise of extreme weather events worldwide--witness the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Sandy, Irene, and Katrina, and the sustained drought across the American West--global warming has become increasingly difficult to deny. What is happening to our planet? And what can we do about it? The Global Warming Reader provides more than thirty-five answers to these burning questions, from more than one hundred years of engagement with the topic. Here is Elizabeth Kolbert''s groundbreaking essay "The Darkening Sea," Michael Crichton''s skeptical view of climate change, George Monbiot''s biting indictment of those who are really using up the planet''s resources, NASA scientist James Hansen''s testimony before the U.S. Congress, and clarion calls for action by Al Gore, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Van Jones, and many others. The Global Warming Reader is a comprehensive resource, expertly edited by someone who lives and breathes this defining issue of our time.

Traditional Chinese edition of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Our planet is the only one we have, but it is no longer the big blue, but the big polluted. If we continue to turn a blind eye to this problem, it will catch up with us sooner rather than later. The book substantiate the conclusions through facts and figures on agriculture, weather, natural resources... and behooves humans to take immediate actions to restore our planet. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

Bill McKibben has written his first book about Lewis, a boy who lives on the coast of Maine near a lighthouse. Enjoy the tale of Lewis'' exciting adventure as he races to save a ship on a stormy night. With just enough suspense for young readers, this fun read-a-loud book is illustrated with lively art by Robert Logan.

A new edition of a classic McKibben book about what it takes to be a world-class athlete and where the true meaning of endurance can be found. At 37, the celebrated writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben took a break from the life of the mind to put himself to the ultimate test: devoting a year to train as a competitive cross-country skier. Consulting with personal trainers, coaches, and doctors at the US Olympic Center, he followed the rigorous training regimen of a world-class athlete. Along the way, he learned to cope with his physical limitations and, when his father was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor, discovered something about the real meaning of endurance. Told with his trademark intelligence, humor, and honesty, Long Distance is an insightful examination of the culture and mind-set of endurance athletes, and a moving and inspiring meditation on finding balance in our often harried lives.

Powerful, impassioned essays on living and being in the world, from the bestselling author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy For a generation, Bill McKibben has been among America''s most impassioned and beloved writers on our relationship to our world and our environment. His groundbreaking book on climate change, The End of Nature, is considered "as important as Rachel Carson''s classic Silent Spring"* and Deep Economy, his "deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding"** exploration of globalization, helped awaken and fuel a movement to restore local economies. Now, for the first time, the best of McKibben''s essays—fiery, magical, and infused with his uniquely soulful investigations of modern life—are collected in a single volume, The Bill McKibben Reader. Whether meditating on today''s golden age in radio, the natural place of biting black flies in our lives, or the patriotism of a grandmother fighting to get corporate money out of politics, McKibben inspires us to become better caretakers of the Earth—and of one another. *The Plain Dealer (Cleveland ) **Michael Pollan

Bestselling author Bill McKibben turns activist in the first hands-on guidebook to stopping climate change, the world''s greatest threat Hurricane Katrina. A rapidly disappearing Arctic. The warmest winter on the East Coast in recorded history. The leading scientist at NASA warns that we have only ten years to reverse climate change; the British government''s report on global warming estimates that the financial impact will be greater than the Great Depression and both world wars—combined. Bill McKibben, the author of the first major book on global warming, The End of Nature, warns that it''s no longer time to debate global warming, it''s time to fight it. Drawing on the experience of Step It Up, a national day of rallies held on April 14, 2007, McKibben and the Step It Up team of organizers provide the facts of what must change to save the climate and show how to build the fight in your community, church, or college. They describe how to launch online grassroots campaigns, generate persuasive political pressure, plan high-profile events that will draw media attention, and other effective actions. Fight Global Warming Now offers an essential blueprint for a mighty new movement against the most urgent challenge facing us today.

Contending that more is not better for consumers, bestselling author McKibben offers a realistic, if challenging, scenario for a hopeful future. For those who wonder if there isn''t more to life than buying, he provides insight on individual responsibility as well as global awareness.

The twentieth century brought technological advances that led to improved quality of life for millions. But technology also brought devastation at Chernobyl, Bhopal, Minamata, Love Canal, and other places throughout the world now synonymous with the dark side of technology and human action. Vulnerable on this Earth is the first comprehensive book to explore the causes and consequences of fifteen major manmade environmental disasters in the twentieth century. Author Robert Emmet Hernan tells the story of toxic materials dumped into the sea, buried on land, and discharged into the air; of polluters recklessly advancing their own financial interests and ignoring dangers to others; and above all, of the determination and dignity of ordinary people who heroically fought for justice and change. Â From the preface by Bill McKibben: "In the years to come, the line that Hernan draws between natural and environmental disasters will blur. . . . What will remain the same, however, is human vulnerability. That vulnerability endangers us, of course-but it is closely related to the love, the shared concern, that might save us yet." Â Robert Emmet Hernan is an assistant attorney general in the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Department of Law and has served as trial counsel in numerous toxic waste cases, including the Love Canal case. Â Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and Wandering Home . A prolific writer on environmental issues, McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

"In this collaborative project, photographer Chris Jordan and writers Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin combine their perspectives on the causes and consequences of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. Victoria Sloan Jordan''s poems touch the emotional terrain with a spareness that echoes the austere visual landscape. Taken together, these four viewpoints bear witness to the profound tragedy and raise challenging questions about the cultural conditions that contributed to its unprecedented severity."--BOOK JACKET.

Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben''s argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth''s environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement. More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.