Ten years ago, writer Bill McKibben was a 6-foot-3, 160-pound, self-described “wimp.” And so, at age 37, the lanky author scrapped his work routine to spend a winter training to be a cross-country ski racer.

McKibben, facing an early midlife crisis (or, he wondered, was he just silly or vain?), turned to Olympic experts and equipment. Then he went to the northern Vermont village of Craftsbury Common, which he told friends had “the most reliable snow in the East.”

There, that January, his dream melted.

“I went out for a long session one morning, dodging the puddles and growing bare spots, kicking on through the slush,” he wrote later. “I came to the Black River, which had unfrozen, swelled and now flowed fast across a 50-foot section of trail. Soon I was thigh-deep in the rushing snowmelt, and as branches swept by on all sides, all I could think was, what on earth am I doing here?”

Others might have wondered about the weather, but McKibben was sure what was happening. An environmental scholar at Middlebury College, he is the author of “The End of Nature,” a 1989 bestseller and the first book about global warming written for a general audience.

As McKibben tells it, carbon dioxide and other gases from smokestacks, tailpipes and burning forests are filling up the atmosphere, allowing sunlight in but preventing some of the resulting heat from radiating out. That phenomenon, he continues, is melting polar ice, raising sea levels and shifting weather patterns worldwide.

“The End of Nature” is now available in 20 languages on six continents. But that’s just the beginning of McKibben’s work. He has written eight more books on related environmental topics (his latest, “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future,” is due in March), as well as articles for such magazines as The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Orion and Outside.

McKibben thinks globally — and acts locally. Last Labor Day, he led hundreds of Vermonters in a five-day, 50-mile walk from his home in Ripton to Burlington in a call for laws to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. On the eve of the November election, he reiterated his plea for government action by climbing to the top of Camel’s Hump and speaking via cell phone to activists gathered in several communities below.

McKibben told the Vermont Senate about the problem last week and is talking up a nationwide day of rallies this spring. He’s fired up about global warming. But not everyone’s hot on him.

“There is a peculiar phenomenon going on here in Vermont that I confess I don’t understand: It’s called Bill McKibben,” Kirby commentator John McClaughry recently said on the radio. “He seems to think that humans are cooking the planet by committing the sin of internal combustion and living better with electricity.”

The Bush administration and many business leaders also are loathe to hear McKibben’s fire-and-brimstone predictions. Even believers can take issue with his intensity. The New Republic magazine says he can sound “so sanctimonious.” The Washington Post Style section has called him “the nation’s environmental scold, author of one book after another warning that the world is hurtling toward an overheated season of doom.”

McKibben, retaining a wry sense of humor, offered the Post his own self-deprecating quote: “All I’ve really done,” he told the paper with a laugh, “is write books that could be called ‘Five Really Hard Things You Can Do to Make a Small Difference.’”

But McKibben says the problem of global warming is serious. So what does he think is the solution? And why, in the growing debate over climate change, does he rally and rile up so many?

Worldly start

McKibben acquired his world view early. Born in California in 1960, he went to elementary school in Toronto, Canada, and junior and senior high school in Lexington, Mass. His father, a journalist, moved the family from one city to the next, reporting for such publications as Business Week, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal.

The younger McKibben was a teenager when he started covering sports for the Lexington Minuteman.

“For whatever reason I enjoyed it immensely,” he recalls, “and by the time I was out of college, there was nothing else I knew how to do.”

McKibben is modest: He was a state high school debate champion who went to Harvard University, where he was president of the student newspaper, the Crimson. One day he received a call at the office. This is Mr. Shawn, the small, shy voice said. Did the student want to work for The New Yorker magazine?

McKibben figured it was a prank. He replied with two unprintable words and hung up. But when the same voice called back six months later, McKibben’s ready response was “yes.”

McKibben speculates that the legendary editor William Shawn must have turned to the Crimson in search of young writers. Arriving at the magazine after graduation in 1982, McKibben wrote for “The Talk of the Town” column. Contributors, however, had yet to receive bylines. And so although McKibben was working for one of the nation’s most prestigious magazines, he wasn’t making a name for himself.

At the time, McKibben was living in an apartment on the corner of Bleecker Street and Broadway. That’s where he found the story that would change his life.

Proverbial light bulb

McKibben grew up in suburbs “where the whole point was to insulate you from the natural world” and went on to live in a half-dozen sublets in New York. One day in the mid 1980s, he eyed his apartment’s wiring and water and gas pipes and decided to trace their contents back to their sources.

His search mushroomed into a 42-page story for The New Yorker. He traveled 100 miles upstate to the city’s water reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains, farther north to hydroelectric dams in Canada and south to oil refineries in Brazil. There, he repeatedly dipped his finger into the hot petroleum.

“This ritual,” he wrote in 1986, “sounds silly, and it is, unless you are thinking very hard about the reservoirs deep beneath the earth, flush with endless millennia of dinosaurs and leaves, and unless you imagine that the liberated oil shooting up a well and splashing into a beaker will power your air-conditioner.”

A proverbial light bulb popped on in McKibben’s head.

“For the first time in my life,” he recalls, “I realized how dependent I was on this world.”

McKibben started reading writers such as environmental essayist Wendell Berry, deemed by the New York Times as the “prophet of rural America.” McKibben also found influence of a different sort in media magnate S.I. Newhouse, who bought The New Yorker in 1985 and fired Shawn two years later.

McKibben quit in protest. If that wasn’t dramatic enough, he packed up his apartment and moved to the wild, remote reaches of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

“It was cheap,” he explains today, “and I completely fell in love with the landscape, the particular biology, the seasons … I was truly at one with this.”

Shortly thereafter in the nation’s capital, James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist who now is considered the world’s leading researcher on global warming, reported his first findings. The next day, the New York Times featured the front-page headline: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.”

McKibben, reading the specifics, feared everything around him was endangered. He sums up what he felt with one word: “Anguish.”

He started writing a book on climate change and finished it four months later. He titled it “The End of Nature.” For the author, it was a portentous beginning.

Future of mankind?

McKibben opened the book with some simple chemistry: Gas, oil, coal and wood contain carbon. Add a flame and some air and you create carbon dioxide. An engine emits about 5½ pounds of carbon for every gallon of gas it burns. You can’t see, smell or taste it, but scientists say it’s mixing with other natural and manmade gases in the atmosphere to weave a molecular blanket around the Earth.

“The chemistry of the upper atmosphere may seem an abstraction, a text written in a foreign language,” McKibben wrote in his book. “But its translation into the weather of New York and Cincinnati and San Francisco will alter the lives of all of us.”

That’s because the blanket is trapping heat from the sun, which is warming the planet and warping precipitation and wind patterns, scientists say. As a result, polar bears are losing the ice they live on and bugs are finding new hotspots to breed. Without immediate intervention, McKibben worries about the future of mankind.

“We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather,” McKibben warned in his book. “By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence.”

Type the words “global warming” into an Internet search engine today and you’ll receive 28 million responses. But when McKibben wrote his book almost two decades ago, he could stack all the available reports atop his desk. Proposing “The End of Nature” then was like telling the Flat Earth Society the world is round.

“I was, like the early scientists, fairly far out on a limb,” McKibben says today. “But my radar and reporting told me these guys were right. The degree to which anyone is listening to me about anything else since has something to do with the unfortunate fact that I was right.”

He doesn’t say this boastfully, but woefully. Back in 1989, publishers were competing to print “The End of Nature.” That didn’t surprise him. What followed did.

Search for answers

Many environmentalists haven’t read “The End of Nature” because they fear the title is the book’s forgone conclusion. But McKibben, a practicing Methodist who says he finds God in nature, capped the last chapter with the hope “we take the chance offered by this crisis to bow down and humble ourselves” and collectively work toward solutions.

What came next: Nothing.

“I thought people would quickly figure out this is the largest challenge that humans have yet faced and reorganize society in order to deal with it,” the author says today.
Instead, America entered the era of gas-guzzling SUVs. McKibben didn’t understand the lack of response.

“I became interested in why.”

That simple inquiry has sparked McKibben to write eight more books in the past two decades. Each meticulously chronicles his search for answers to questions culled from his life and times.

Why weren’t people responding to his book? In 1992’s “The Age of Missing Information,” McKibben watched one day of a cable system’s output — 1,700 hours of videotaped television — to reveal the dulling influence of mass media on society, then contrasted it by spending 24 hours alone on a mountain to show how nature can bring people, figuratively and literally, to their senses.

What about his pessimistically titled “The End of Nature”? In 1995’s “Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth,” he traveled the world to chronicle people who, by living simply, showed others how communities could curb environmental problems.

Should he and his wife, writer Sue Halpern, bring children into the world? In 1998’s “Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families,” he wrote how they decided to limit themselves to a daughter, Sophie, born in 1993.

When his daughter was ready for school in 2001, McKibben and family relocated to Ripton, a town of almost 600 people just east of Middlebury. There he bought a small plot once owned by poet Robert Frost and built a solar-powered home with wood from Vermont Family Forests, a nonprofit conservation and cultivation group.

Middlebury College, hearing the nationally known author had moved to the area, offered him free office space and the title “scholar in residence in environmental studies.”

McKibben accepted. He doesn’t have to teach; he just writes about the world around him. He starts by looking out his office window.

‘More and more’

“Winter is much shorter and much less intense,” McKibben says. “I’m particularly sensitive to this because it’s my favorite season by far. Cross-country skiing is my great vice, and there’s probably no sport more immediately and powerfully affected by climate change.”

Downhill skiers can crank up snowmaking machines, but cross-country skiers must rely on cold temperatures and clouds. (McKibben strapped on skis for his 2000 book “Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously” in search of “a break from failing to save the world,” only to chronicle all the warm weather he encountered.)

Meteorologists say this winter’s lack of cold and snow is caused in part by El Niño, an occasional, abnormal warming of the Pacific Ocean that leads to a shift in weather patterns. But they also agree that seasonal temperatures are increasing even in years that aren’t affected by the phenomenon.

Lake Champlain, for example, is freezing less frequently than in the past; records show it has iced over only three times between 1990 and 2000. Residents in the Northeast Kingdom town of Danville, population 2,287, have made a ritual of guessing when Joe’s Pond will melt. Fifteen years ago, it was May 6. In 2000, it was April 30. Last year, it was April 16.

Higher temperatures also bring lower heating bills and less snow shoveling, making many homeowners wonder, what’s wrong with a little warmth?

McKibben points to the native maples he fears will give way to forests of oak and hickory — similar to those of northern Virginia.

“As it warms, we’ll really notice the forest composition begin to change. A lot of people already have noted that fall colors have been more muted.”

He also cites earlier springs that are cutting the number of cold nights and warm days needed for maple sugaring and longer summers that are luring disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks.

“It was tragic to watch so much rainfall last spring because of what it did to farmers, but it was doubly tragic to know we’re going to see this more often. Warm air pulls more water vapor, which leads to more precipitation. One can never attribute a particular event to global warming. But what you can say is these are just the sort of things we’re going to see more and more and more of.”

Drive to change

What’s a Vermonter to do? McKibben has several ideas.

1. “When you buy your next car, buy a hybrid.”

McKibben’s Honda Civic hybrid, powered by a gas engine and rechargeable electric battery, gets more than 50 miles per gallon, compared with an SUV at 15 mpg or a Toyota Camry, the country’s best-selling car, at 34 mpg.

A driver who switches to a hybrid could save an average of 16,000 pounds of carbon dioxide and $3,750 a year, according to the non-partisan StopGlobalWarming.org group, whose membership includes Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican John McCain.

2. “Take out every light bulb in your house and stick in a compact fluorescent.”

Replacing three frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescents can save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide and $60 a year, StopGlobalWarming.org says. For more savings, McKibben turns them off when not in use.

“I do think my wife and daughter think I have an obsession about lights,” he confesses. “At one point they were referring to me as the prince of darkness.”

3. “Insulate the hell out of your house.”

McKibben has sealed his home to the point he has to deal with excess woodstove heat. Walls and ceilings that are properly insulated can save 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide and $245 a year, while doorways and windows that are caulked and weather-stripped can save 1,700 pounds of carbon dioxide and $274 a year.

McKibben ends his suggestion list there, even though he’s gone so far as live an entire winter on a locally grown diet heavy on root vegetables, all to save fuel used by supermarkets to import out-of-state food.

“I’d say by March, Sophie finally looked up and, confronted with a parsnip, said ‘Yuck.’”

That’s why McKibben believes, in the end, the most palatable way to address the problem is on “a mass scale” — specifically, through governments setting goals to reduce carbon emissions. His 50-mile walk last Labor Day weekend asked the public to push for an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, 20 percent renewable power by 2020, and cars that get at least 40 miles per gallon.

How he’d do that: “Stop taxing payrolls and start taxing carbon emissions. Everyone would start buying hybrid cars and riding mass transit because it would make complete economic sense. And there would be much stronger pressure toward local food production because the real price of shipping would start to be reflected.”

Heated debate

McKibben, like the issue of global warming itself, draws vocal believers and skeptics.

Vermont Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin laments that he wore a T-shirt when he shot a buck the last day of deer season in November. He thinks climate change is so problematic, he’s focusing the first weeks of the Legislature on developing a state response. When Shumlin needed someone to introduce the issue to his colleagues last week, he chose McKibben.

“First of all he’s one of ours,” the Putney senator says. “And I’ve read a lot of his articles, and he’s really good about putting the problem in plain English.”

Then again, not everyone agrees with McKibben’s take on the situation. Nationally, the Bush administration is spending more than $4 billion on global warming research but won’t sign on to federal legislation or international treaties seeking emission reductions. Other conservative and business interests are equally skeptical.

Why? McClaughry — head of the Ethan Allen Institute, a free-market think tank in Concord — agrees the climate is changing and gases including carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor are warming the planet.

But McClaughry and other critics argue it’s not primarily because of man-made fossil fuel emissions. Instead, he cites factors including naturally occurring greenhouse gases, the brightness of the sun, changes in the Earth’s orbit and shifting deep ocean currents that produce the El Niño effect.

“There is little or no prospect that human intervention, even at enormous economic and social cost, can detectably alter the result of these natural processes,” McClaughry says.

Some environmentalists dismiss McClaughry as just another conservative mouthpiece. But he holds a master of science degree in nuclear engineering from Columbia University. He’s quick to point out that doesn’t make him an expert in atmospheric physics. But he says he has enough knowledge of scientific method to state confidently that McKibben’s assertions about man-made global warming “have little or no foundation.”

(“I don’t have any ax to grind with Bill McKibben personally,” he adds.)

The bottom line: Although few people now doubt the existence of global warming, many continue to argue about the cause and extent of the problem and, as a result, don’t agree on the solution.

Light-bulb moment

McKibben hasn’t met McClaughry but says “my bias is to admire him immensely” because of the book McClaughry co-authored with University of Vermont professor Frank Bryan, “The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale.”

“I think of myself as a conservative in some deep sense,” the environmentalist says. “I like the world as it is and would like to see as much of possible of it maintained. But I don’t understand why conservatives in general have been so unwilling to deal with the obvious science around climate change.”

Then again, McKibben has his suspicions.

“Dealing with it successfully is going to require something other than pure laissez-faire approach.”

McKibben’s calls for cutbacks on fossil-fuel use aren’t popular with oil companies or businesses that depend on petroleum for manufacturing and trucking. But the environmentalist says it’s not only about energy conservation, but also consumer culture.

Wal-Mart made the front page of The New York Times this month for its campaign to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs that would use 75 percent less electricity and last 10 times longer than regular ones.

You might think McKibben would hail that as a bright idea. Instead, speaking to a meeting of 800 environmental journalists last fall in Burlington, he blasted Wal-Mart, accusing the world’s largest retailer of merely offering consumers a way to free up money to burn elsewhere in the store.

Soon after, McClaughry offered his own opinion on Waterbury radio station WDEV.

“Well, for Pete’s sake,” the commentator said, “won’t anything satisfy McKibben and his fellow greenies?”

Time to think

The Washington Post had its own words for McKibben upon publication of his 1998 book “Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas.” The paper didn’t seem to believe “an austere little volume wrapped in a coarse brown paper jacket printed on a solar press by an outfit called the Luddite Press” would ask consumers to limit holiday spending to $100.

And so McKibben, interviewed by a metropolitan reporter with a sharp pen, faced the same double-edged sword often held by other people. First, he’s asked to prove he’s pure.

“I don’t have a TV because it makes life less fun,” he told the Post.

Then, when deemed puritanical, he’s asked to prove he’s not.

“Well, I spend a lot of my time driving and traveling across the world telling people not to drive a lot,” he told the Post.

Ultimately the paper made peace with McKibben: “With a widow’s peak of graying, closely cropped hair, wide green eyes and protruding lips, he is a striking, earnest, friendly presence,” it concluded. “He is gentle in his speech, careful in his steps, just funny enough to disarm anyone who might dismiss him as an extremist.”

Even so, McKibben knows he can come off sounding like a Grinch. That’s why he has a ready explanation for why he isn’t one: The Grinch thinks the big day is all about boxes and bows. The environmentalist understands it’s really about the spirit that surrounds them.

And so McKibben is working to rally the Whos of the world. He is spokesman for a nationwide protest April 14 in which people will gather in “America’s most iconic places” to call for an 80 percent cut in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050. He also is proposing more local food and energy production in his upcoming book “Deep Economy,” which USA Today recently singled out as “one non-fiction title expected to do well.”

“For those who worry about environmental threats, there are solutions to work through the worst of those problems,” McKibben says in publicizing the book. “For those who wonder if there isn’t something more to life than buying, I encourage you to consider your life as an individual and as a member of a larger community.”

Amid the heat, that’s where he feels hope.

Contact Kevin O’Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.