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Feb. 2, 2012 – One of the world’s best known environmentalists, author and activist Bill McKibben, will give a presentation at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 16 in Shafer Auditorium at Allegheny College. McKibben’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is part of the college’s Year of Sustainable Communities.

McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment. “The End of Nature,” which he published in 1989, is regarded as the first book on climate change written for a general audience. It has been published in more than 20 languages.

He is a founder of the climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. The first big grassroots effort to involve people from every nation, 350.org has crossed the boundaries of language and faith, and even the great gulf between rich and poor. Time Magazine called McKibben “the planet’s best green journalist,” and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was “probably the country’s most important environmentalist.”

McKibben’s talk at Allegheny — titled “350: The Most Important Number in the World” — discusses the discovery in the summer of 2007 that Arctic ice had begun to melt far more rapidly than scientists had expected. Before the season was out, scientists had begun to conclude that the earth was already moving past tipping points — that indicators, from the thawing of glaciers to the spread of droughts, showed global warming was a present crisis, not a future threat. Leading climatologists even gave a number for the red line: 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere, a number that has already been passed.

McKibben will describe not only the science of the situation but also the global movement that he’s led to help change the world’s understanding of its peril and spur the reforms necessary to return the planet to safety.

He is also the author of “The Age of Missing Information,” “Hope, Human and Wild,” “The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation,” “Maybe One,” “Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously,” “Enough,” “Wandering Home,” “Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future” and “The Bill McKibben Reader.”

In 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history.

He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and he won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College.

The Year of Sustainable Communities at Allegheny College is a series of activities, workshops and events aimed at inspiring the campus and community to examine what makes a community sustainable in the richest sense of the word—that is, able to provide a good quality of life to those who live and work there and to be resilient in the face of challenges.

For more information on the Year of Sustainable Communities, including a schedule of events, visit www.allegheny.edu/events and click on the “Year of Sustainable Communities” tab.