Climate Stories: Empowerment in Times of Despair
An Evening Talk with Bill McKibben
PLUS! A debrief with Storytellers/Climate Activists Judith Black and Elisa Pearmain
March 16th, 2025 at 7:00-8:30 PM EST
Tickets: Pay What You ae able $25-$50
Register Here: https://www.simpletix.com/e/climate-stories-empowerment-in-times-of-de-tickets-205912
Join us for an inspiring talk by author, and environmental educator, and Ghandi Peace Prize winner Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and now Third Act, which organizes people over sixty for climate action and justice. Following Bill’s talk of approximately 40 minutes, Judith and Elisa will lead a 45-minute debrief sharing their short climate action stories and inviting participants to cull from our broad and collective experience stories (folk, historical and contemporary) that address some of the issues we have just heard about! These will be shared with the large group as time allows. It matters who is telling the stories, and what stories are getting out into the world. Help us be a force for truth and active hope!
About the Presenters:
Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 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’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.
Elisa Pearmain has been a professional storyteller for 39 years, including as Storyteller in Residence in the Boston Public Schools. She is the award-winning author of two collections of world tales. As a founding member of Green Hudson, and the Chair of the Plastic Reduction Committee, Elisa has helped to educate people and to ban single use plastic in her town. She is a card-cutting member of Third Act.
Judith Black has performed 14 times at the International Storytelling Festival, and venues in S. Africa, Sweden, Israel, France, and Freedom, NH. She is also a committed climate activist who has stood on the tracks trying to stop coal trains from reaching their destinations, been arrested protesting Citibank’s fossil fuels investments, and fasted for 8 days to bring attention to a new fossil fuel Peaker plant in her neighborhood. With Fran Stallings and Sheila Arnold under the egis of ASST, she launched CLIMATE CONVERSATIONS: Science and Stories in a unique approach to public engagement and consequential action related to our climate crisis. Prior to death, she hopes to bind story and climate so that it creates a fire for action in everyone’s heart. www.storiesalive.com storiesalive@gmail.com
