Bill Mckibben, Author at Toward Freedom

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Bill Mckibben July 23, 2012 Bill Mckibben

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe. read more

Rewriting the “Tragedy of the Commons”

Bill Mckibben January 17, 2011 Bill Mckibben

It was two years before the first Earth Day in 1970 when Garrett Hardin penned the famous essay “Tragedy of the Commons,” and it fit a certain bleak and despairing mood of the time.

What’s It Really Like to Deal in Regional Currency?

Bill Mckibben October 29, 2010 Bill Mckibben

Want to encourage the local economy? Try printing your own regional money.

10/10/10 Global Work Party for Climate Solutions

Bill Mckibben October 8, 2010 Bill Mckibben

Looking back a few weeks, we were bitterly disappointed when the White House failed to act on our request that they put solar panels back on the roof.

But in truth, I’m almost happy that they waited. Today’s announcement that the Obamas will be taking their showers and cooking their breakfast courtesy of the sun could not have come at a better moment. We’re four days away from the start of the weekend’s giant Global Work Party, and this is the perfect example of everything that we’ve been talking about for almost a year: it demonstrates the power of individual actions to carry political impact. read more

Networking the Neighborhood in Vermont

Bill Mckibben June 8, 2010 Bill Mckibben

Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie, moved to the south end of Burlington, Vt. in 2000. He recalls, "We'd landed in what we thought was our dream neighborhood. It was walkable, near the lake, full of trees. But we were having trouble getting to know the neighbors. One night, my wife and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about it. It hit us that in the Midwest, where we're from, people brought cookies to their neighbors. We've been here a year-where were our cookies?"