Last week the Adirondack Council handed out its 24th Conservationist of the Year award — and there couldn’t have been a more worthy recipient. It was Bill McKibben, a writer, thinker and environmental activist of national repute who splits his time between the Adirondacks, where he has a home in Johnsburg, and Vermont, where he is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

McKibben has been writing books about the environment, our relationship with it and what we are doing to it, for nearly 20 years. And he is very good. Whatever the particular subject or approach, whether essays, anecdotes or more academic stuff, his books are not only smart and insightful but beautifully written.

Before becoming an author McKibben wrote for The New Yorker magazine, and it shows in his graceful style. Add to that an original mind; a practical, philosophical, even spiritual view of nature and what makes for a well-lived life (a la Henry David Thoreau), and you have someone worth reading.

His 12-plus books include “The End of Nature,” from 1989, which received critical acclaim as the first book on climate change written for a general audience, and “Deep Economy,” a 2007 national bestseller that challenges the prevailing view that growth and consumption are the keys to a healthy economy and future. In addition, McKibben has contributed numerous magazine and newspaper articles to publications ranging from the New York Times Sunday Magazine and New York Review of Books, to Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and The Sunday Gazette of Schenectady.

In the last few years McKibben has become a leading activist, organizing marches in Vermont and encouraging rallies by local groups across the country to raise awareness about global warming and call for congressional action on carbon emissions. He has also been promoting local agriculture and energy production, not only as an answer to oil and food shortages, but as a way to save the land and enrich our own lives and those of our neighbors by building sustainable local communities.

McKibben is an important, relevant voice, and the Adirondack Council, which shares many of his values, was wise to recognize him.