Bill McKibben
Visits Center for the Forest Preserve
McKibben presentation part of the Arthur M. Crocker Series
Bill McKibben speaks at the Center
photo by Ken Rimany
In the fall of 2005, noted nature writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben spoke and signed his latest book, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Region, Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks at The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks’ Center for the Forest Preserve, 897 St. David’s Lane in Niskayuna, NY.
McKibben spoke to Association members and guests in the Center’s Paul Schaefer Adirondack Room about the book, and how and why he wrote about a three-week walk from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks, with reflections on the deep hope he finds in the two landscapes.
He also took time to reflect upon the urgent need to find in the examples of Vermont and Adirondack peoples he met on his journey much needed lessons and inspiration for more sustainable ways of living in our communities, our food and our energy requirements. He noted how many people respond to surveys over the past fifty years reply that their quality of lives has declined. McKibben said he believes he can trace these survey results to the breakdown of traditional neighborhoods and the public commons, and the rise of “hyperindividualism,” as well people’s feelings of isolation as communities developed and children are raised who are absolutely tied to use of the personal automobile.
He finds encouragement in the growing local agricultural foods and regional markets in the Champlain Valley that are showing we need not rely on energy intensive, mass markets to feed ourselves well, and in the wildness of the Adirondack region that we need in order to demonstrate human humility and restraint, that the road to total human control over our environment has proven disastrous to ourselves and the more than human world around us. He gave great credit to the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks for its work over 104 years to better ensure such wildness in the Adirondacks (and Catskills) through our advocacy for the “forever wild” NYS Constitution.
He begins his journey atop Vermont’s Mt. Abraham, with a stunning view to the west that introduces us to the broad Champlain Valley of Vermont, the expanse of Lake Champlain, and behind it the towering wall of the Adirondacks. “In my experience,” McKibben tells us, “the world contains no finer blend of soil and rock and water and forest than that found in this scene laid out before me—a few just as fine, perhaps, but none finer. And no place where the essential human skills—cooperation, husbandry, restraint—offer more possibility for competent and graceful inhabitation, for working out the answers that the planet is posing in this age of ecological pinch and social fray.”
As he walks, McKibben contemplates the questions that he first began to raise in his groundbreaking meditation on climate change, The End of Nature: What constitutes the natural? How much human intervention can a place stand before it loses its essence? What does it mean for a place to be truly wild?
Wandering Home is a wise and hopeful book that enables us to better understand these questions and our place in the natural world. It also represents some of the best nature writing McKibben has ever done. It is published by Crown Publishers, New York.
Bill McKibben is the author of, most recently, Enough and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, he lives with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter in the mountains above Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont. Their house in the Adirondacks is in Johnsburg, New York.
McKibben’s presentation was the second in an annual series of lectures and seminars called the Arthur M. Crocker series in honor of the Association’s long-time President and Adirondack activist, the late Arthur M. Crocker.