Environmental activist Bill McKibben will deliver this year's Harding Lecture Sept. 30.
Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben will deliver the 2017 Walter Harding Lecture Sept. 30 at 4 p.m. in Wadsworth Auditorium on the SUNY Geneseo campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
McKibben, the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the founder of 350.org, an environmental advocacy group that uses grassroots organizing and mass mobilization to oppose new coal, oil, and gas projects; limit climate-warming emissions; support sustainable energy solutions at the community level; and educate governmental leaders and the general public.
McKibben also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, widely regarded as the first book about climate change written for a general audience, and Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. He writes frequently for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone.
In 2013, he was awarded the Gandhi Peace Award and honored by the Thomas Merton Center with its yearly prize recognizing “activists who work on national and international issues that transform our world.”
McKibben’s annotated edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden gratefully acknowledges its “comprehensive and illuminating” predecessor, Walden: An Annotated Edition (1995), edited by Geneseo’s late SUNY Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding. Harding’s annotations are available in an online edition of Walden from Digital Thoreau.
Geneseo launched the annual Harding lecture in 2004 in honor of the late Distinguished Professor Emeritus, who was the world's leading scholar on Thoreau and founding secretary and former president of the Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest international organization devoted to the study of any American author.
Harding's wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of Geneseo students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.