William E. "Bill" McKibben is an American nature writer who was born in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from Harvard University in 1982 and was a staff writer and editor at The New Yorker until 1987 when he began his freelance career. He now lives with his wife in the Adirondack Mountains in New York, and this region figures prominently in his writings.

In The End of Nature, McKibben's first book, he argues that the greenhouse effect is not only part of humanity's destruction of the environment, but a symptom of Man's alienation from the natural world. He calls for an end to practices that contribute to the greenhouse effect, such as burning fossil fuels. Such practices, he writes, "will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature...