RANDOLPH — Bestselling author and environmental activist Bill McKibben will join journalist and activist Amy Goodman on stage at the Chandler Music Hall this Saturday for an evening of motivating and thought-provoking discussion.
The event will take place in Randolph on Jan. 14 beginning at 7:30 p.m.
Fans can easily go online and find discussions between McKibben, a Ripton resident and scholar at Middlebury College, and Goodman of “Democracy Now!” — there are many that have been publicized. The two activists and speakers initiate motivating dialogue in regards to the changing environment, and government policies. They have appeared together at colleges, on the Democracy Now! radio show and at a variety of lecture halls across the nation.
McKibben is not a person you’d expect to find handcuffed in the city jail in Washington, D.C. But that’s where he spent three days in the summer of 2011, after leading the largest civil disobedience in thirty years to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. A few months later the protesters would see their efforts rewarded when President Obama agreed to put the project on hold.
An author and environmentalist McKibben in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel.” His 1989 book “The End of Nature” is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages; he’s gone on to write a dozen more books. He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country except North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
In 2010, McKibben was appointed to the position of Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont. He joined the college in 2001 and was previously scholar in residence in environmental studies. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and currently writes regularly for numerous publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and Outside Magazine. Also in 2010, McKibben received the annual $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship at The Nation Institute Annual Dinner Gala in New York City.
Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!,” a national daily independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Prize, for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and “Democracy Now!” “an inspiration.”
Tickets to Bill McKibben and Amy Goodman at Chandler are available by calling the Chandler box office, noon-5 p.m., Monday-Friday, at (802) 728-6464 or online at www.chandler-arts.org.