Current Affairs

Bill McKibben is a legendary activist and writer whose 1989 book The End of Nature introduced the problem of global warming to a general audience. Since then, he has been one of the world's leading environmental activists, taking major roles in the fossil fuel divestment movement and the campaign against the Keystone pipeline. In his latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, McKibben looks at the Middle America he grew up in and how, beneath its image of cheery prosperity, it was accumulating moral debts that have yet to be paid. McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he proudly told tales of the American Revolution as a tour guide on the town common. But he came to understand that Lexington was a far more complicated place than its mythology told him. While the town is a bastion of liberalism, and in his youth the residents came out to support Vietnam war protesters, at the same time it was d