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Episode 1: The economy is killing us and destroying the world (24 min.)
"There are two problems with our runaway growth economy," Bill McKibben tells Tom Fox. "One is the obvious ecological one, that it's driving us over a cliff as a planet. The second [is] more subtle." He said that in recent years economists and sociologists have learned that our affluence is not making us as happy as we thought it does. "I think our best shot for solving both of these problems is moving toward much more localized economies," he said. Listen to McKibben's explanation.
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McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent. He grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the Talk of the Town column from 1982 to early 1987. Eventually he left the magazine and moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.
He has now written 10 books. His most recent is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He brings his signature clarity of thought to a complicated subject, the negative consequences of our growth-oriented economy.