"Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." --Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend--think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back--on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change--fundamental change--is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.         Bill McKibben is is the author of a dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change. He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Time Magazine called him 'the planet's best green journalist' and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was 'probably the country's most important environmentalist.' Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, he holds honorary degrees from a dozen colleges, including the Universities of Massachusetts and Maine, the State University of New York, and Whittier and Colgate Colleges. In 2011 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In August 2011, he was arrested while protesting the building of a 1700-mile pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, a pipeline that will increase the flow of dirty tar sands oil and wreak havoc on the environment.    This event is sponsored by We the People, a lecture and film series created in partnership by the Exeter Congregational Church, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Exeter, Christ Church, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Water Street Bookstore.  This event is free and open to the public, and is an amazing opportunity to hear speak one of today's most important environmentalists.