The Australian
By: Drew Warne-Smith
It was not a deep love of nature that drew Bill McKibben to the environmental cause so much as his love of a good story.
Raised in a Boston suburb, on the east coast of the US, McKibben made his name writing the Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker magazine.
"It was about as urban an occupation as you could get," McKibben, 49, says with a laugh.
But while at The New Yorker he was commissioned to write a story on the origins of every item in his inner-city apartment. These were the mid-1980s, an era of big budgets and infinite word counts, and the assignment took him to the Grand Canyon, the Arctic and the jungles of Brazil.
"By the end of that piece, I had a much stronger sense than I ever did before about the operation of the natural world," says McKibben, who arrived in Australia yesterday for the Sydney Writers Festival.
"That was the moment I started thinking much more deeply about our physical systems."
In 1989, having quit Manhattan for the Adirondack Mountains, the great wilderness of the American east, McKibben released The End of Nature, one of the earliest sermons about the perils of climate change.
More than 20 years and a dozen books later -- including his latest, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, McKibben agrees that he is no longer a journalist. He is a campaigner.
In March 2008, McKibben founded 350.org, an international green lobby named after the benchmark level of carbon in the atmosphere considered safe.
In October last year, before the climate change talks in Copenhagen, the group co-ordinated what CNN called the most widespread single protest rally in history: 5200 demonstrations in 181 countries.
McKibben now spends his life travelling the world, "spewing carbon behind me", while sounding the alarm about climate change.