Talk:Bill McKibben

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1 originality
2 Photo of Bill
3 about the Luddite comment
4 "Luddite" reference and extra information

[edit] originality

I notice that all or almost all of the material in the lead section of this article is identical to a page in McKibben's own website. --Belgrano 18:13, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Photo of Bill

The photo of Bill McKibben looks scary, and I don't think is typical of him. Can we replace or remove? Unnyn 20:21, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I replaced it. I retained the old image information in an HTML comment tag so it can easily be reincorporated if so desired. --Osbojos 18:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

SO mch better. Nice job! Jessamyn (talk) 05:10, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't see any photograph here. In any case, thanks for removing the former one. I put a request here -Unnyn 17:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] about the Luddite comment

I just removed these sentences: "...skeptical of technological innovation. Some would call him a luddite." While Bill McKibben is skeptical about completely unfettered technological innovation in areas such as human genetic engineering, he is by no means a luddite. He's an advocate of solar and wind power and he writes for an online magazine. Solar power and online magazines both involve technology. Here's an excerpt of an article (full version can be found here:

"The title of the book, "Enough," intentionally provokes the accusation of "Luddite." McKibben addresses this directly, and convincingly demonstrates the fatuousness of such attacks. He would not, for example, withdraw antibiotics or smash the computers. Instead, like Lander's outlook on germline therapy, he believes that we have reached a threshold, a turning point in which the decisions about some of the new technologies represent a radical break from the human project launched with the Enlightenment."

So McKibben used Luddism as a rhetorical device, nothing more. His opinion is a more nuanced than "technology is bad", which is the impression one gets from reading the previous version of the article. If someone wants to reincorporate the Luddite comment I'd appreciate it if they justified themselves on this talk page first. Thanks. --Osbojos 11:37, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Luddite" reference and extra information

Any Luddite reference takes a very non-neutral pov and seems quite inappropriate here, even if someone could argue for it. Meanwhile, it is difficult to find factual information about him. Bios tend to be very vague. But there is some material here: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/essays/mckibben.htm Some of this, such as his date of birth, might be appropriate to include. I'm trying to see whether I can paraphrase his actual arguments, but I may not be the person to try to do them justice in a short space since I'm actually rather unsympathetic. Metamagician3000 06:22, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

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