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Summary: The best single book on global warming.
Review: "The End of Nature" is a calm, wonderfully readable book about both the scientific aspects of global warming and the effects it will have on human societies. The title refers to McKibben's realization that all the rules about hundred year floods and so forth no longer maintain. Norms derived from past records can no longer predict what is to come, because human industrial activity has changed the whole nature of the playing field.
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Summary: Terrific Explanantion Of Forces Leading to Global Warming!
Review: Anyone familiar with the author's other books on man and his fateful connection to the natural environment owe it to themselves to read this seminal offering first published over a decade ago when the phenomenon of global warming was a hotly argued and angrily debated issue. The publication of this new 10th anniversary edition arrives in a world in which most of the author's frightful prognostications regarding the negative consequences of the hotly-debated "Greenhouse Effect" issue of a decade ago have been proven to be accurate and true. If anything, McKibben's warnings were, in retrospect, conservative. For example, five of the ten warmest years on record have been in the last decade. Thus, "The End Of Nature " must be regarded as an intriguing book that comprehensively covers a critically important phenomenon; the massive intrusion of man, technology, and civilization into the natural order of the world's ecosystems to the point that we have ripped them asunder. While the Bushes and Gores fiddle away in their Washington offices, the forces of man are still engaged in such a maddening and suicidal plundering of the world's biological treasure house. The author's basic thesis, now well validated by over a decade of dramatically documented data regarding the globe's climate changes, is that though our massive intrusion into the delicate balance of gases, fluids, and temperature gradients so important in determining the world's weather patterns, we have altered and fragmented the earth's natural balance in an order of magnitude so large and so overwhelming that it has now permanently negated nature's capacity to operate autonomously, independently, and naturally. We have in essence replaced natural forces with our own efforts, and have now become the single most important and decisive element in climatic calculus that determines the weather. As a result, it is no longer possible to pretend that nature is something that just happens out there, and that we are merely subject to its forces and its whims. Instead, the author argues, it is human actions and human interference that now fatefully orients and influences the forces determining the weather. Yet, we live in a culture so embedded in patterns of denial about the effects of scientific and technological intrusion into the natural world that we seem to now regard the natural wilderness as mere grist for amusement parks. We seem so disconnected to nature or to its delicate balancing acts that we have no regard for the consequence of our continuing intrusions into its innermost workings. We seem to have forgotten our dependence on the elements of the natural world in order to survive, and consequently do not comprehend the disastrous consequences our massively ignorance, interference, and corruption of the natural world around us will likely bring. Instead, we worry about our stocks and mutual funds, ignoring the facts that the world's potable water is disappearing as the world's population increases geometrically. We worry about our property values and our next promotions, never recognizing the degree to which our materialistic culture and our over-consumptive way of life is condemning us and the rest of the world to oblivion. So we fiddle as Rome burns. In any event, this is a terrific book, one that anyone interested in where we stand and where we are heading both culturally and globally needs to read. This, along with other books such as Lew Ayre's "God's Last Offer" and David Suzuki's "The Sacred Balance", can give the interested reader a better idea of what kinds of possibilities await us in the new millennium. Enjoy!
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Summary: An Important Book
Review: Bill McKibbon's The End of Nature was first published in 1989. Had I read the book then, my reaction would have been diluted. Instead, after finishing the book in July of 2000, I am stunned by the accuracy of his analysis -- especially regarding the inescapable ramifications of human-induced environmental changes and the path being followed by designers and marketers of genetic engineering. Books that complement Bill's well-expressed thesis include Mander & Goldsmith's "The Case Against the Global Economy" and Winona Laduke's "All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life" and Jeremy Rifkin's "Entropy".
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Summary: Anti-scientific liturgy, filled with errors.
Review: For better reading, try Paul Hawken's "Ecology of Commerce," which provides ideas and methods for creating a better world. End of Nature is filled with errors, and although it uses apparently scientific data, the author is not concerned with accuracy or precision. In discussing his use of scientific information, and the response to the first edition of End of Nature, he states, "The science, however, was only one part of the original book - and not its most important." (p.xix) From here on out, the book is whines and compaints, nothing more. For an example of incorrect data, take this gaffe "Trees and forest still cover about 40 percent of the land on the earth, but this area has shrunk by about a third since preagricultural times, and that shrinkage, it goes without saying, is accelerating." (p14 End of Nature). This claim is not only misleading, but false. First of all, we have no concrete measurements for how much forest there may have been in preagricultural times. Secondly, the argument doesn't account for the growth of other perfectly valid and helpful environments, such as grasslands, that sometimes exude more oxygen than forests. But here's the biggest problem. Regarding forests, in the last century in the U.S. despite a fivefold increase in population, the percentage of land space covered by forests has remained constant - about one-third of the total land space. World forestland has also held steady over the last fifty years. That's right, steady. At the same time world food yield per acre has DOUBLED since 1950, while world food prices fell by HALF from 1965 to 1990. We have been becoming more efficient farmers, better environmentalists who provide more and better food to the world, using less land, and at cheaper prices. In America, less farmers now produce more food and more efficiently. We feed three times as many people with one third the number of farmers on one-third less farmland than in 1900. With less than a fifth of the world's population, American ingenuity and resourcefulness now produces almost a quarter of the world's food McKibben does not even provide a bibliography for his claims. The reader has no normal scholarly way to check his claims. I'll tell you where I got my counter-statistics: Statistical Abstract of the United States, and, the eminent Julian Simon (read all his books, he won't let you down!)You can check my facts at your nearest local library.
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Summary: Eloquent, Beautiful, Shattering
Review: If I could recommend only one book to family, friends and neighbors about the gathering environmental darkness, this would without question be it. The End of Nature, now about ten years old, was generally dismissed by the intelligensia, (notably Christopher Lasch of Harper's), who described it as a "tear-stained" work of "rural piety", not incidentally missing the point entirely. This is not a garden-variety work of environmental apocalypticism, though McKibben does allow that the odds in favor of just such an ecological and social collapse are pretty good. The "successful" alternative future he describes is equally, if not more horrible. If, by dint of technology and sheer ingenuity, we manage to avoid the consequences of the ongoing overshoot, what then? Imagine, if you can, a world in which we, our pets (and pests) and a carefully selected handful of bioengineered plants and animals live on, and in which almost everything else dies. Without wilderness, without even a semblance of connection to our origins, we probably could continue some form of human civilization. The question, however, is why, as individuals, we would want to. The groundwork for this sort of dessicated world is already well-laid, given our very American demands for paved roads and air conditioning everywhere we go, along with our ceaseless demands for more stuff - and make that bigger and cheaper, too. McKibben does harbor some optimism that we can choose to take a more difficult path. I only wish I could share that optimism. Read and remember this important book!
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Summary: Prophetic and life changing.
Review: In the ten years between the time THE END OF NATURE was first published in 1989 and reissued in 1999, we experienced seven of the ten warmest years in recorded history (p. xiv), which establishes Bill McKibben as a global warming prophet. And the thing is--we're still not getting it. "We live in the oddest moment since our species first stood upright," McKibben writes in the new Introduction to his environmental classic, "the moment when we are finally grown so big in numbers and in appetite we alter everything around us" (pp. xv-xvi). The United States alone dumps 15 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere than it did ten years ago (p. xvi). Arctic glaciers continue to retreat, ice grows thinner, and the sea level steadily rises (p. xviii). In short, "this buzzing, blooming, mysterious, cruel, lovely globe of mountain, sea, city, forest, of fish and wolf and bug and man; of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen--it has come unbalanced in our short moment on it" (p. xxv). McKibben's basic argument is that our relationship with the concept of "nature" as something separate and wild has changed, and in our pursuit for "a better life," we have totally wrecked the environment (p. 48). By changing the weather, for instance, we have altered every spot on earth, depriving nature of its independence, leaving "nothing but us" (p. 58). Stated differently, we have ended nature's separation from human society (p. 64). Because nature provides us with a sense of comfort, reading THE END OF NATURE is not a happy experience. McKibben has issued a wake-up call, and his book should be required reading for any global-warming skeptic, or for anyone who drives a SUV. As Thoreau said, we are living lives of quiet desparation--we enjoy the consumptive, easy life. However, as McKibben's compelling argument demonstrates, such a lifestyle is incompatible with the well being of our planet. He encourages us not only to change the way we act, but also to change the way we think by adopting the radical notion that we learn to respect nature "for its own sake," as a "realm beyond the human," and give it "room to recover" from the damage we have done (pp. 174-77). This book was a life changer that prompted me, in part, to move from the concrete, urban sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona to Boulder, where there is a respect for open space, and where it is still possible to have a humble relationship with nature. G. Merritt
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Summary: The time is coming
Review: It's been a while since I read this book, and it has been one that has always stuck out in my mind as being one of the better environmental books that I've read. One thing that the author touches upon is the relevance of time; things take time to happen, sometimes a painfully long time, and this is often difficult for humans to understand. Nature has progressed at its own pace from the beginning; at times its course has been checked, but in the end Nature has rebounded and rebalanced itself. For much of this process, humans have been a part of it; possessing only "primitive" technologies they were obligated to rely on Nature; but over the course of the last few millennia, the human race has manage to evolve to a point where we can dominate and control Nature to our own benefit. This of course has had an adverse effect on Nature, and during the 20th century we began to experience the consequences of this state of things. But in many cases, the change has been subtle, and as a result there has been a bitter debate raging as to whether the concerns of the envirnmentalists are in fact legitimate. Naysayers will argue that things really haven't changed all that much, that when one looks at the evidence that is presented, it doesn't look like much is happening at all. They do so because they have the inherent human trait of seeing things from their own perspective, and fail to see how we are subtly having a negative impact on the environment; the end, or whatever you want to call it, may not come in the year so-and-so in our lifetime, but it will invariably come if we continue on as we are.
Rating:
Summary: The time is coming
Review: It's been a while since I read this book, and it has been one that has always stuck out in my mind as being one of the better environmental books that I've read. One thing that the author touches upon is the relevance of time; things take time to happen, sometimes a painfully long time, and this is often difficult for humans to understand. Nature has progressed at its own pace from the beginning; at times its course has been checked, but in the end Nature has rebounded and rebalanced itself. For much of this process, humans have been a part of it; possessing only "primitive" technologies they were obligated to rely on Nature; but over the course of the last few millennia, the human race has manage to evolve to a point where we can dominate and control Nature to our own benefit. This of course has had an adverse effect on Nature, and during the 20th century we began to experience the consequences of this state of things. But in many cases, the change has been subtle, and as a result there has been a bitter debate raging as to whether the concerns of the envirnmentalists are in fact legitimate. Naysayers will argue that things really haven't changed all that much, that when one looks at the evidence that is presented, it doesn't look like much is happening at all. They do so because they have the inherent human trait of seeing things from their own perspective, and fail to see how we are subtly having a negative impact on the environment; the end, or whatever you want to call it, may not come in the year so-and-so in our lifetime, but it will invariably come if we continue on as we are.
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Summary: Don't Ignore this book.
Review: Just finished this excellent book: The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben: This is a pivotal book for the layman in understanding environmentalism for the reason that it highlights a crucial detail about our survival: Nature as a system of biology independent of man's influence no longer exists. Through well-argued reasoning and by giving clear examples, McKibben shows how man's footprints on nature have been so intrusive on the workings of Nature as to render it a system quite different from the one our ancestors knew only a short time ago. Beyond being a item of sentiment, which it is because the Earth can no longer be viewed as a guiding, completely objective force independent of us, the end of Nature means that we have irrationally intruded on the very system that sustains us without have known how it works. We have changed the climate, destroyed crucial habitats for animals and planets we may need to survive, and so pullulated the air and water that from any point on Earth we can wish to test we can find chemicals only we have created. We have no idea how drastically these changes will play out in the future, or whether we can survive them. But, it should be clear to everyone, especially the ordinary citizen, the degree to which we have altered Nature. Any fondly held belief that our ancestors might have held about Nature's ability to recover from catastrophes (including our presence) must now be seen as an illusion--for now we are on our own. We have a tiger by the tail: We have taken over the very controls of this planet without having learned a fraction of the process that took three billion years to come about. Our survival depends on us understanding our environment and that has been severely compromised by what we have done to a deeply complex process we are only beginning to appreciate.
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Summary: A classic, soulful lament on Nature & our new version of it
Review: McKibben, a masterful writer, takes on the issue of global warming--a phenomenon that, since his time of writing (1989), has been confirmed by all scientists not bought and paid for by industrial interests. The 14 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1980, with 1998 being the hottest ever. McKibben explores what ramifications this changed global climate will have on various aspects of our environment and society, from rising sea levels to thawing of the tundra to superhurricanes to unpredictable rainfall to agricultural disaster to rampant disease. McKibben also examines a few other human-caused ecological disasters, such as ozone depletion and acid rain, and he warns of bioengineering's potential for colossal damage. Most importantly, he looks at our anthropocentric hubris and "deviant" way of living, and, in measured, non-hysterical tone, calls for us to "bow down" before God and adopt the "humble" way of living a deep ecology! (what Duane Elgin would call "voluntary simplicity" and what E.F. Schumacher called "Buddhist economics"). Finally, McKibben explores the theological and philosophical implications of our meddling with God-created Nature, a meddling which has produced a new "nature," unpredictable, unreliable, and out of control. Though there are current works that give more up to date figures on environmental destruction (check out the websites for the UN Env. Programme; the Union of Concerned Scientists; Wildlife Institute; Natural Resources Defense Council, etc.), McKibben's work is still "must reading."
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