Wednesday, June 17th with Bill Mckibben, 5-6:30 PM
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​Thursday, June 18th with Ethan Tapper, 7-9 PM

Join us for two inspiring evenings at Main Street Arts as part of the Vermont Summer Solstice Project Conference. Through conversation, storytelling, and community gathering, these events invite participants to engage with ideas around climate action, stewardship, resilience, and our relationship to the natural world.

Bill McKibben
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Bill will discuss the state of the climate crisis and the critical role we as educators play in helping the next generation to become informed and to feel inspired and empowered to take action.
 
Bill McKibben is a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate, democracy, and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989. His most recently released book is The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

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Register

Ethan Tapper
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What does it mean to love a forest?

In this talk, Ethan Tapper, a forester, bestselling author and digital storyteller from Vermont, will draw from his work as a forester and his book How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World to discuss what it means to care for forests and other ecosystems at this moment in time. How do we respond to the harmful legacies of the past? How do we use our species' incredible power to heal rather than to harm? How do we reach toward a better future? In a time in which many believe that “protecting” ecosystems means protecting them from ourselves, Ethan argues that humans must take action to help ecosystems heal and to move into a more abundant future, and that to do so is an act of care and compassion – of love.

Ethan’s message is at once compassionate and pragmatic, clear-eyed and hopeful, sobering and inspiring – a powerful new vision for how we can build a world that works for all of its ecosystems and all of its people.

Register

Sponsored by:
Main Street Arts, Vermont Academy, The Solstice Project, Rockingham Conservation Commission