Bill McKibben Announced as 2006 Unity College Commencement Speaker
 

Bill McKibben is a former staff writer for The New Yorker.
 

His books include Hundred Dollar Holiday, Maybe One, The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information and Hope, Human and Wild.
 

The End of Nature, published in 1989, sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming; the decade of science since has proved his prescience. In Maybe One, he took on the most controversial of environmental problems-- population.

The father of a single child himself, McKibben maintains that bringing one, and no more than one, child into this world will hurt neither your family nor our nation--indeed, it can be an optimistic step toward the future.
 

Now, in Hundred Dollar Holiday, he makes a cse for a more joyful Christmas. McKibben contends we can have a far more meaningful and satisfying holiday by sharply reducing the amount of money we spend on it.
 

By setting an informal target budget for gifts -- and substituting homemade presents and gifts of time for playstations, camcorders, and five irons -- we can begin to recover the things that really matter: family togetherness, community, faith and fun.
 

McKibben is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside, and The New York Times.
 

McKibben lives with his wife and daughter in Vermont where he teaches at Middlebury College.

Protecting Nature Religiously -- Article About Bill McKibben from the Harvard Gazette 2002