350.org’s Bill McKibben to speak at McMaster Seminar on Higher Education

Environmental activist Bill McKibben will speak at Hamilton’s Liuna Station Sept. 30.

The president of 350.org and author of The End of Nature will give the first talk in this year’s McMaster Seminar on Higher Education: Practice, Policy, and Public Life.

His talk will explore the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology and will show that each threatens to take us past a point of no return.

McKibben founded the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, known as 350.org, in 2008.

The best-selling The End of Nature, published in 1989, is widely considered to be the first book on climate change written for a general audience.

In it, McKibben demonstrated that humanity had begun to alter and endanger the environment on a global scale.

He will hold a workshop for students in McMaster’s sustainability courses when he visits Hamilton.

McKibben is currently the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The lecture, entitled Enough, is scheduled for Sept. 30, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., at Hamilton’s Liuna Station (360 James Street North). It’s free and open to the public.

The talk is presented by The Bourns Lectureship in Bioethics and the McMaster Seminar on Higher Education: Practice, Policy, and Public Life.