Climate Change Activist, Author McKibben to Speak at Holy Cross

Lecture to Open Yearlong Series on Sustainability

WORCESTER, Mass. – Bill McKibben, best-selling author, activist and the “world’s best green journalist” according to Time  magazine, will give a lecture titled “Past the Tipping Point: The global fight for a stable climate” on Monday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The lecture, which opens a yearlong series on sustainability called “In Our Lifetimes: Environmental Change and Stewardship,” is sponsored by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture and is free and open to the public.

McKibben is the author of the landmark book The End of Nature (Random House, 1989), the first book about global warming written for a general audience. This spring, he published Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, 2010), suggesting that humans have passed the tipping point on climate change, that the degradation of Earth is irreversible, and that humans must seek new means to survival on an increasingly instable planet.

A longtime activist, McKibben is founder and global organizer of 350.org, an international campaign to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, what scientists consider to be the upper limits of acceptable CO2 levels. He is a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College and a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside.

Next in the series, "In Our Lifetimes: Environmental Change and Stewardship,"

* Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, will give a lecture titled “An Ecological Inquiry: Jesus and the Cosmos” on Tuesday, Oct. 5 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. Appointed to the Vatican-sponsored dialogue on ecology, Johnson will explore the traditional role of Jesus Christ as Savior of the human race and consider if his teachings can be applied to a more bio-centric or cosmos-centric theology.

To learn more about this series and other events in the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture and to listen to lectures online, visit www.holycross.edu/crec.

About The Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture: Established in 2001 and housed in Smith Hall, the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture provides resources for faculty and course development, sponsors conferences and college-wide teaching events, hosts visiting fellows, and coordinates a number of campus lecture series. Rooted in the College's commitment to invite conversation about basic human questions, the Center welcomes persons of all faiths and seeks to foster dialogue that acknowledges and respects differences, providing a forum for intellectual exchange that is interreligious, interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international in scope.  The Center also brings members of the Holy Cross community into conversation with the Greater Worcester community, the academic community, and the wider world to examine the role of faith and inquiry in higher education and in the larger culture.