A
best-selling journalist, author and editor, this year's North
Country Citation recipient Bill McKibben lives in the southern
Adirondacks. A 1982 graduate of Harvard, he was a staff writer
for The New Yorker for five years before setting out, successfully,
on his own. His work has appeared in publications and periodicals
as diverse as The New York Times, Adirondack Life, The New
York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Esquire
and Outside. Among his books are The End of Nature, The Age
of Missing Information, The Hard Work of Simple Living, Maybe
One: A Case for Smaller Families, and Hope, Human and Wild.
He has written introductions to an edition of Thoreau's Walden
and a new book of photographs and text by noted Adirondack
photographer Gary Randorf, and his work will appear in the
third edition of Paul Jamieson's acclaimed anthology The Adirondack
Reader, due out in 2003.
In much of his writing, McKibben appeals for a gentler treatment
of the Earth, and he has been an eloquent advocate of the
Adirondacks as a model for saving what is left of the planet's
wilderness while simultaneously providing the setting for
a sustainable economy. He has been praised by the writer Terry
Tempest Williams for his "belief in the coming era of
environmental restoration" and dismissed as "an
environmental wacko" by Rush Limbaugh. The winner of
the 2000 Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing, he is a trustee
of Paul Smith's College. He has been a frequent visitor to
St. Lawrence, contributing to the environmental studies program,
the Festival of the Arts and the Writers Series.
