...I have one child; she is the light of my life; she makes me care far more about the future than I used to. And I have one child; so even after my work I have some time, money and energy left to do other things….If I had three kids, I would still do those things, but less of them; either that, or my work would come at their expense. As it is, once in a while I'm stretched too thin and don't see [my daughter] for a day, and that reminds me to slow down, to find the real center of my life....

American environmentalist and nature writer. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts, McKibben attended Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. He then worked as a staff writer at the New Yorker, which serialized his first book, The End of Nature (1989), an introduction to climate change and a plea for a reformed attitude to nature. Since then he has written about a broad array of environmental topics, earning him Time magazine's description as "the world's best green journalist." McKibben's books include Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth (1995); The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005); Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007), an attempt to envision a more localized and more sustainable economic system; and most recently the best-selling Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (2010), about the inevitability of climate change. See also billmckibben.com.