William "Bill" McKibben is an American environmentalist and writer, who frequently writes about global warming and alternative energy and advocates for more localized economies, and a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. In 2009, he led the organization of 350.org, which coordinated what Foreign Policy magazine called "the largest-ever global-coordinated rally of any kind," with 5200 simultaneous demonstrations in 181 countries. The magazine named him to its inaugural list of the 100 most important global thinkers, and MSN named him one of the dozen most influential men of 2009. Professor McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing is sometimes spiritual in nature. Al Gore wrote in 2007 that "when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben's descriptions of the planetary impacts ... made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title 'Ozone Man' from the first President Bush." Immediately after college he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. He left the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.