In Conversation with Authors Madeline Ostrander and Bill McKibben

How do we find our way home in a time of unprecedented upheaval and climate disruption? How can older Americans help create a safer world for themselves, their families, and generations to come? The answer, according two leading climate authors, may lie in rebuilding our connections to community and re-examining both history and identity in order to correct the mistakes that got us in this mess. Join authors Madeline Ostrander and Bill McKibben as they discuss what it means to live in America in a time of climate disaster and unruliness—and how we might build resilience and re-examine the nature of home.

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Ostrander’s debut book, At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth, offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances—from Florida to Alaska. The book pairs deeply reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis. Ostrander is a climate journalist for outlets such as The Nation and The NewYorker.comand the former senior editor of YES! Magazine.

McKibben’s most recent book, The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, 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. McKibben is a renowned author, educator, and environmentalist, who helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and who has recently helped found Third Act, to build a progressive organizing movement for people over the age of 60.

Valerie Schloredt, books editor of YES! Magazine, will moderate this virtual panel about some of the most important questions of our time—and how they affect us at home.

This event is hosted by the Elders Climate Action Virginia Chapter and Elders Climate Action, and in partnership with Third Act.

Madeline Ostrander is a science journalist and the author of At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth. Her work has also appeared in the NewYorker.com, The Nation, Sierra magazine, PBS’s NOVA Next, Slate, and numerous other outlets. Her reporting on climate change and environmental justice has taken her to locations such as the Alaskan Arctic and the Australian outback. She’s received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Artist Trust, the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Edith Cowan University in Australia. She is the former senior editor of YES! magazine and holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She lives in Seattle with her husband.

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, a founder of 350.org, and now co-founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, his most recent, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened. He is the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2013 he won the Gandhi Peace Award; in 2014 he was awarded Sweden’s Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel. He holds honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. McKibben has also launched a subscription newsletter, The Crucial Years, on Substack

Politics and Prose Bookstore is making signed book copies available for this event

Purchase a signed copy of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben or

At Home on an Unruly Planet by Madeline Ostrander from Politics and Prose Bookstore. Please include “signed copy” in the order comments.