Bill McKibben Wins 'Alternative Nobel' Award

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury Bill McKibben has won the 2014 Right Livelihood Award. As one of three laureates to win the prize, which is often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” McKibben will share a cash award of 1.5 million Swedish Krona (approximately $210,000) with human rights activists Asma Jahangir and Basil Fernando. Whistleblower Edward Snowden and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger received Right Livelihood Honorary Awards.

According to the Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award Foundation, McKibben won the award “for mobilizing growing popular support in the U.S.A. and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change.” The awards will be presented at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament on December 1, 2014.

McKibben has been a scholar in residence at Middlebury since 2001 and is founder, along with several former Middlebury students, of 350.org, the first global grassroots climate change movement. The organization now works in nearly every country in the world on campaigns to reduce fossil fuel usage and promote climate action.

“This honor comes as much to my home institutions–350.org and Middlebury–as it does to me,” said McKibben. “Of course 350.org was born at Middlebury, and its initial leaders learned about the world in its halls. We’re all immensely grateful to the College for what it has given us, and it is the great pleasure of my life to keep teaching and working here in the mountains of Vermont.”

McKibben’s 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 former staff writer for the New Yorker and a frequent contributor to major publications, including the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone.

Founded in 1980, the Right Livelihood Awards are presented annually and were introduced “to honor and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today.” This year, there were 120 proposals from 53 countries. There are now 158 Right Livelihood Award laureates from 65 countries.