Bill McKibben
Author, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
We need to do an unlikely thing: we need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough. Not in every detail; there are a thousand improvements, technological and cultural, that we can and should still make. But good enough in its outlines, in its essentials. We need to decide that we live, most of us in the West, long enough. We need to declare that, in the West, where few of us work ourselves to the bone, we have ease enough. In societies where most of us need storage lockers more than we need nanotech miracle boxes, we need to declare that we have enough stuff. Enough intelligence. Enough capability. Enough.
Biography
Environmentalist Bill McKibben, a visiting scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, is the author of "The End of Nature," the first book for a general audience about global warming. Published in 1989, it is now available in 20 languages. His most recent book, "Enough," critiques human genetic engineering, nanotechnology and other rapidly advancing technologies.
His six other books include "Hope, Human and Wild," "Long Distance," and "Maybe One." A former staff writer for the New Yorker, his work appears regularly in the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harpers, Outside, and many other national publications.
Prior to his arrival at Middlebury, he was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst fellowships, and the winner of the 2000 Lannan Prize in Nonfiction Writing. McKibben holds honorary doctorates from several institutions and received a Bicentennial medal from Middlebury College in the fall of 2000.