the flag the cross and the station wagon

The End of Nature, his first book, was published in 1989 and was regarded as the first book on climate change for a general audience. In 2010 The Boston Globe called him 'probably the nation's leading environmentalist,' and Time magazine has called him 'the world's best green journalist.' He studied at Harvard, and started his writing career as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth― The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon ―could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.īill McKibben is the author of Eaarth, The End of Nature, Deep Economy, Enough, Fight Global Warming Now, The Bill McKibben Reader, and numerous other books.

In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth.īut fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing―knowing―that the United States was the greatest country on earth. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

One of the New Yorker 's Best Books of 2022īill McKibben―award-winning author, activist, educator―is fiercely curious.

The flag the cross and the station wagon