“Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important.” –Barbara Kingsolver

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We’ve created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.

That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend–think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we’ve managed to damage and degrade. We can’t rely on old habits any longer.

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back–on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change–fundamental change–is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

From the bestselling author of The End of Nature comes a passionate plea to limit the technologies that could change the very definition of who we are

We are on the verge of crossing the line from born to made, from created to built. Sometime in the next few years, a scientist will reprogram a human egg or sperm cell, spawning a genetic change that could be passed down into eternity. We are sleepwalking toward the future, argues Bill McKibben, and it’s time to open our eyes.

In The End of Nature, nearly fifteen years ago, McKibben demonstrated that humanity had begun to irrevocably alter–and endanger–our environment on a global scale. Now he turns his eye to an array of technologies that could change our relationship not with the rest of nature but with ourselves. He explores the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology–all of which we are approaching with astonishing speed–and shows that each threatens to take us past a point of no return. We now stand at a critical threshold, poised between the human past and a post-human future.

Ultimately, McKibben offers a celebration of what it means to be human, and a warning that we risk the loss of all meaning if we step across the threshold. His wise and eloquent book argues that we cannot forever grow in reach and power–that we must at last learn how to say, “Enough.”

“Passionate, succinct, chilling, closely argued, sometimes hilarious, touchingly well-intentioned, and essential.” –Margaret Atwood, The New York Review of Books

“[Oliver Wyman’s] skillful, nuanced performance is enough to keep listeners from tossing their earbuds aside in despair…This isn’t easy listening, but it’s essential for anyone concerned about humanity’s future.” — AudioFile Magazine

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.

Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature — issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic — was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.

Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history — and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away.

Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben recounts the personal and global story of the fight to build and preserve a sustainable planet

Bill McKibben is not a person you’d expect to find handcuffed and behind bars, but that’s where he found himself in the summer of 2011 after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years, protesting the Keystone XL pipeline in front of the White House.

With the Arctic melting, the Midwest in drought, and Irene scouring the Atlantic, McKibben recognized that action was needed if solutions were to be found. Some of those would come at the local level, where McKibben joins forces with a Vermont beekeeper raising his hives as part of the growing trend toward local food. Other solutions would come from a much larger fight against the fossil-fuel industry as a whole.

Oil and Honey is McKibben’s account of these two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight–from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers to climate change. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels of the fight to stop global warming, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

Includes a bonus interview with the author

 “We’ve got a long history of resistance in Vermont and this book is testimony to that fact.”
–Bernie Sanders

A book that’s also the beginning of a movement, Bill McKibben’s debut novel Radio Free Vermont follows a band of Vermont patriots who decide that their state might be better off as its own republic.
 
As the host of Radio Free Vermont–“underground, underpowered, and underfoot”–seventy-two-year-old Vern Barclay is currently broadcasting from an “undisclosed and double-secret location.” With the help of a young computer prodigy named Perry Alterson, Vern uses his radio show to advocate for a simple yet radical idea: an independent Vermont, one where the state secedes from the United States and operates under a free local economy. But for now, he and his radio show must remain untraceable, because in addition to being a lifelong Vermonter and concerned citizen, Vern Barclay is also a fugitive from the law.
 
In Radio Free Vermont, Bill McKibben entertains and expands upon an idea that’s become more popular than ever–seceding from the United States. Along with Vern and Perry, McKibben imagines an eccentric group of activists who carry out their own version of guerilla warfare, which includes dismissing local middle school children early in honor of ‘Ethan Allen Day’ and hijacking a Coors Light truck and replacing the stock with local brew. Witty, biting, and terrifyingly timely, Radio Free Vermont is Bill McKibben’s fictional response to the burgeoning resistance movement.

“Narrator Eric Jason Martin adds gusto to this mini-memoir, which spans much of author Bill McKibben’s lifetime.”-AudioFile on The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

Bill McKibben–award-winning author, activist, educator–is fiercely curious.

“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing–knowing–that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth.

But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril.

And he is curious: What the hell happened?

In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth–The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon–could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Co.

This program is fully sound-designed.

From environmentalist and bestselling author Bill McKibben comes We Are Better Together, a hopeful, inspiring audiobook celebrating the power of human cooperation and the beauty of life on Earth, beautifully enhanced by original sound design.

When we work together, we humans can do incredible things.

We share the responsibility to address climate change and our changing planet. It is critical that we act collectively to protect our beautiful, fragile world.

Celebrating the amazing things people can do, it’s an inspiring message of hope.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.