Ask Climate Leader Bill McKibben Your Question

The next in-depth video interview by the Salt Spring Forum to be published on The Tyee will be with leading climate crisis author and activist Bill McKibben. Tyee readers are invited to submit questions for McKibben beforehand (details on how are below).

McKibben is co-founder of the climate group 350 and a global authority on what must be done to fight the climate emergency. It was McKibben who wrote the book The End of Nature about climate change in 1989 that put the threat firmly on the public radar.

Last month The Tyee’s Geoff Dembicki talked to McKibben about how the coronavirus pandemic is hitting the climate movement. The Salt Spring Island interview, to be conducted this Thursday, will advance that theme and range farther.

This is the third such collaboration between The Tyee and the Salt Spring Forum, which is hosted by its co-founder Michael Byers, a professor of international law at UBC who lives on the island.

The first instalment was a conversation with physician and author Kevin Patterson that calmly and thoroughly prepared us for the crisis we find ourselves in now. Find it here.

The second shared the insights of professor and author Timothy Brook, a professor of history at UBC and one of the West’s foremost scholars of the social and cultural history of China. Brook examined China’s experiences with epidemics past and present, and how the current regime has responded. Find it here.

For years, the Salt Spring Forum has brought fascinating speakers and audiences together on the island off the coast of B.C.

Now, along with the rest of us, the group has had to reconfigure their programs since gathering in person is considered a public health hazard.

Rather than cancelling altogether, Forum organizers are filming the discussions and distributing them online. In lieu of having a live audience, they are asking for your smart questions beforehand to pose to their next speaker. That’s where you come in.

What would you like to know from Bill McKibben? Curious about what the pandemic is teaching us about global ecology? Or the power of humans to change their behaviour? The capacity of governments to respond to crises? How to find hope difficult times?

You are warmly invited to send your question to: [email protected]. When doing so, please say if your name can be mentioned when your question is posed.

The video will be available on the Salt Spring Forum website soon after the interview, and will be posted on The Tyee website soon afterward.

Please note: The Forum receives no revenue from these video-events, but does incur costs.

If you would like to assist Salt Spring Forum with a tax-deductible donation, please visit here.