Book Review: The End of Nature

Citation: McKibben, B., 1989, 2006, The end of nature: New York, Random House, Inc.
Link to Amazon.com

I'm back! A busy fall has kept me from posting in a long while. I have been able to read a few books, but not all were directly related to climate science (Micheal Pollan's In Defense of Food was great!). Really though, I just haven't kept up with my writing, so I should have two posts in the next few weeks. This is the first.

Bill McKibben, now a famous environmentalist (first for his writing, now for his advocacy), wrote The End of Nature in 1988 when popular non-fiction about climate change really didn't exist yet and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (published in 1962) was still the preeminent piece in the libraries of environmentalists (note that I haven't yet read Silent Spring, but I will soon!). Nowadays The End of Nature is considered a formative work in environmental non-fiction.

The End of Nature weaves emotional, scientific, and even theological arguments together to show that we have fundamentally changed the earth and that we need to reconsider our relationship to it. It was written when the science of anthropogenic climate change was still in its nascent stage, and thus global warming is presented as a new evil, something that is even more damaging than the effects of land-use changes (e.g. deforestation), the depletion of ozone due to CFCs, industrial pollutants and acid rain. McKibben explained the central thesis of the book in an introduction for a 2006 reprint as follows:

The SCIENCE, however, was only one part of the original book - and not its most important. What mattered most to me was the inference I drew from that science: that for the first time human beings had become so large that they altered everything around us. That we had ended nature as an independent force, that our appetites and habits and desires could now be read in every cubic meter of air, in every increment on the thermometer.

This doesn't make the consequences of global warming any worse in a practical sense, of course - we'd be in as tough a spot if the temperature was going up for entirely "natural" reasons. But to me it  made this historical moment entirely different from any other, filled with implications for our philosophy, our theology, our sense of self. We are no longer able to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces - now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man. That was what I meant by the "end of nature." (p. xviii)

By the "end of nature," McKibben meant that we altered the environment in a fundamentally different way than in the past:

But always before, our disruptions [to the earth] had some boundary to them...you could always find vast territory where human influence mattered not at all...[eventually,] we began to alter even those places where we were not. Short of wide-scale nuclear war, global warming represents the largest imaginable such alteration: by changing the very temperature of the planet, we inexorably affect its flora, its fauna, its rainfall and evaporation, the decomposition of its soils...this change in quantity is so large that it becomes a change in quality (p.xix)

I think one of the reasons this book resonates so strongly with me is that McKibben focuses mostly on the actions of individuals, not of corporations. In this book, his first real foray into climate change, McKibben isn't afraid to acknowledge the role of the average consumer:

We have done this to ourselves, by driving our cars, building our factories, cutting down our forests, turning on our air conditioners...we have changed the atmosphere - changed it enough so that the climate will change dramatically...Man's efforts, even at their mightiest, were tiny compared with the size of the planet - the Roman Empire meant nothing to the Arctic or the Amazon. But now, the way of life of one part of the world in one half century is altering every inch and every hour of the globe. (p. 39)

However, it's important for me to point out that McKibben acknowledges the social, political, and economic factors that drove citizens of developed nations to this cultural consumptive norm. We perpetuate the system, but the system was built largely by powerful corporations and it's increasingly hard to exist outside of it. I'm not trying to "make excuses" for the everyday consumer (e.g. me), but I think it's important to realize that bigger entities are in play here. Later in McKibben's career (i.e. today), he takes on fossil fuel companies head on, but more on that in a later post.

This book is great because McKibben talks to people from many different philosophical and/or political schools of thought. At this point (1988 or earlier), the dichotomy of global warming advocate vs. global warming denier was not quite realized, so we get a rare glimpse into the real (non-partisan) opinions of different groups. For example, McKibben discusses the "Gaia hypothesis", which attests that the Earth itself is a living organism and its main function is to sustain life. As a geologist this is a poignant theory, because I am very aware of the mass extinctions that Earth has experienced in its vast history and also aware that there are always a few species that survive these events, so that Earth "lives" on despite its major makeovers. A geologist's lens makes human life seem so insignificant. Mckibben reviews the work of the Gaia hypothesis founder, British scientist and NASA employee James Lovelock:

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that this is "life" he is discussing, not "human life." Gaia, the living organism, is as happy with one-celled wriggling whatevers as she is with mighty man. "Although Gaia may be immune to the eccentricities of some wayward species like us...this does not mean that we as species are also protected from the consequences of our collective folly." (p. 134)

In other words, yes indeed life goes on, and yes indeed geology teaches us that human existence is such a small part of Earth's history, and our power as a species is so dwarfed compared to that of the Earth... HOWEVER, our habits, no matter how insignificant they seem over geologic time, are definitely powerful enough to affect our quality of life, and bring into question the sustainability of the human race.

When reading this book, you will read logical/scientific arguments that are the SAME ones we hear today, which is severely troubling when you remind yourself that this was written TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. You realize that up to this point we have only taken baby steps when it comes to redesigning our economies, regulating our carbon emissions, and altering our consumption patterns. In that way this book is much more powerful now than it was initially - it forces the reader to acknowledge that we haven't made much progress, and, at least in my case, inspires me to make sure that the next 25 years do finally see some change! One thing we have going for us is that the effects of global warming are more readily apparent now than then, and its easier for people to come to the realization that we've upset the balance. I know the book sounds depressing (the state we are in is indeed a sad one!), but it really has the power to motivate.

Overall, The End of Nature is more philosophical than scientific, and McKibben employs more pathos than he does logos. Perhaps this is because the science of global warming was new, not as rigorously proven. But I think the philosophical arguments and ideas he explores in this book are just as important as the science! For this reason I think it's a great book to add to one's collection. It would be a particularly good book to start with if you were trying to tackle the world of climate-change-related non-fiction. This book asks us to reconsider our relationship to the environment around us and to Earth as a whole. I'll leave you with a quote from the closing pages:

As birds have flight, our special gift is reason. Part of that reason drives the intelligence that allows us, say, to figure out and master DNA, or to build big power plants. But our reason could also keep us from following blindly the biological imperatives toward endless growth in numbers and territory. Our reason allows us to conceive of our species as a species, and to recognize the danger that our growth poses to it, and to feel something for the other species we threaten. Should we so choose, we could exercise our reason to do what no other animal can do: we can limit ourselves voluntarily...What a towering achievement that would be (p. 182).

Thanks for reading. -JM