Environmental Activist and Writer Bill McKibben Will Speak at Yale

Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, who writes about global warming, alternative energy and the risks associated with human genetic engineering, will speak at Marquand Chapel of Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect St., on April 3, noon–1 p.m.

Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, who writes about global warming, alternative energy and the risks associated with human genetic engineering, will speak at Marquand Chapel of Yale Divinity School, 409 Prospect St., on April 3, noon–1 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public.

Titled “The Most Important Number on Earth,” the talk will focus on climate change. Its title refers to a December 2008 meeting of world leaders in Copenhagen to reach a new agreement on reducing carbon emissions.

Registration is not required, and free parking will be available in the Divinity School parking lot.

The talk, the inaugural Arthur W. Galston Memorial Lecture, is sponsored by the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale and Yale Divinity School. The lecture is named for the late Yale professor Arthur W. Galston, a noted plant physiologist and bioethicist who helped bring a halt to the use of the herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Among the books McKibben has written are “The End of Nature,” “The Age of Missing Information,” “Wandering Home,” “Enough” and “Maybe One.” He is also a frequent contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone.

Together with a small group of young people, McKibben founded the organization Step It Up 2007 to lobby Congress to “enact immediate cuts in carbon emissions, and pledge an 80% reduction by 2050.” Through its website (stepitup2007.org), the organization mobilized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states on April 14, 2007. The organizers describe the event as “the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history.”

“Fight Global Warming Now,” McKibben’s guide to initiatiting environmental activism in one’s community, was published later in 2007. “The Bill McKibben Reader,” a collection of 44 essays written for various publications over the past 25 years, was published in March 2008.

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Media Contact

Dorie Baker: dorie.baker@yale.edu, 203-432-1345