Bill McKibben

One of the things I'm grateful for about living where I live is that the sky gets dark at night.

There's something very nice about being small.

I remember taking a bunch of kids from the city out hiking and camping one night.

These were high school kids.

And we got out and stepped away from the campfire so we could really see the sky.

And I was showing them the Milky Way, which they'd never seen before.

And one of them said appropriately, you know, freak me out, dude.

And I remember thinking that's probably really the moment at which we became sort of humans when some ape looked up at the sky and was like, freak me out, dude.

Hey there, I'm Bill McKibben.

I'm the founder of Third Act.

I write and I teach.

Yes, I first came to see

climate change as the issue that would take up my whole life when I wrote the first book about it back in 1989.

So I was finding out about it just about the same time that it was sort of dawning on anybody in the world that there even was such a thing as climate change.

A few scientists had been working on it for some years.

And as we now know, the oil companies had been working on it for some years and knew all about it.

but I got to help break the story to the rest of the world.

And in the course of writing that first book, I was 27 or 28, I guess, it really was clear to me that this was the biggest story of all time.

It also became clear to me that though I was a good journalist raised as a newspaper man, I very much cared about the outcome of the story.

I did not want the planet to burn up.