The recipient of the 2014 Alternative Nobel Prize (Right Livelihood Award) Bill McKibben is one of the world's leading environmental writers and activists. 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 is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide grassroots climate change movement. 350.org is named for the safe level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million.

Bill McKibben was the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, and holds honorary degrees from 18 colleges and universities. Foreign Policy named him to their inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers, and the Boston Globe said he was “probably America’s most important environmentalist.” A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes frequently for a wide variety of publications around the world, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone.

In 2014 a newly discovered insect - a woodland gnat - was named in his honour: Megophthalmidia mckibbeni.