At Once Distant and Very Close: The Millions Interviews Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben planned a strange follow-up to The End of Nature, his bestselling 1989 debut and the first mass-market American book to articulate the crisis of global warming. Working with volunteer customers of the Fairfax, Va., cable television system—at the time, the nation’s largest—McKibben collected VHS tapes of every program and commercial that aired on May 3, 1990. In the months that followed, McKibben watched every moment of television broadcast that day, comparing the world he saw on television to the world he encountered during his time hiking and camping in the woods of upstate New York. The Age of Missing Information beautifully juxtaposes those two distinct experiences, forgoing comprehensive or chronological coverage for a series of linked essays that scrutinize the cultural assumptions that television reinforces.
The Age of Missing Information is clearly invested in McKibben’s environmentalist ethic, but the book has more on its mind. Twenty-five years after its publication in 1992, The Age of Missing Information is both an incredibly detailed artifact of American mass culture in the early 1990s and a provocative meditation on the gap between information and knowledge in our current world. This August, I spoke to McKibben, the founder of 350.org, by phone about his memories of writing the book, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, podcasting, and solar-powered television. McKibben’s first novel, Radio Free Vermont, comes out this November from Blue Rider Press.
In the summer and fall of 1990—27 years ago now—you were watching television eight hours a day, for months and months. Do you remember anything from that time? Is there anything burned
