Rediscover: The End of Nature

Thirty years ago, author and environmental activist Bill McKibben released The End of Nature,  which is considered one of the first books about climate change written for a general audience. In 1980, while a student at Harvard after the election of Ronald Reagan, McKibben vowed to pursue a lifetime of environmentalism. He was inspired by the Yellowstone fires of 1988 to serialize what would become The End of Nature in the New Yorker. McKibben's book introduced many readers to the concept that human activity could alter the entire planet in dangerous ways. It was last published in 2006 with a new introduction by McKibben (Random House, $16, 9780812976083). Since The End of Nature, he has written 16 other works of nonfiction, many of which tackle environmental issues, as in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010), or his most recent book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Holt, $28, 9781250178268), which was published last April.

McKibben's environmental activism includes the Step It Up 2007 campaign, global rallies coordinated by 350.org, opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline project, the 2014 People's Climate March and more. He received the Lannan Literary Award for nonfiction writing in 2000 and the Sierra Club's John Muir Award in 2011. McKibben is also one of two judges for a new poetry contest, the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, awarded by the Academy of American Poets and Treehouse Investments to honor "exceptional poems that help make real for readers the gravity of the vulnerable state of our environment at present." --Tobias Mutter

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