McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
The End of Nature is the most widely reviewed environmental book yet to be written, chiefly because it deals with the sweeping, easily identifiable problems that we all recognize: global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, and overpopulation.
McKibben’s book begins with and remains consistent to its alarming eponymous premise—that humanity and its industrial culture have ended the natural processes of the planet. Period. No matter what enlightened steps are taken to change things now, even if all of the governments of the world suddenly went “eco-fascist” and forced their citizens to radically curb their birth rates, forsake fossil fuels, and return to Neolithic agriculture, the planet’s ecological health will continue to spiral downward at an exponential rate for centuries to come. This is perhaps the most terrifying of McKibben’s several propositions: for all the glib talk today of hydrogen fuel cells and international ozone-control treaties, it is already too late. McKibben states that humanity has stamped its injurious presence over every geophysical aspect of life on Earth, so that “we have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.”
The aggregate harms our species has inflicted on the rest of the world since the Industrial Revolution are difficult to fathom, not to say accept. The author sees an appalling realization of the ignorant power of humanity in the fact that we have actually tampered with the ancient biotic flux of evolution through our anthropogenic atmosphere, just as we have artificially elevated rates of floral and faunal extinction, caused curtains of venomous precipitation to rain down on a waning world, and lately birthed genetically-engineered, essentially man-made domestic animals—monsters. (McKibben presents us with a horrifying spectacle of the full evolution of this new agricultural industry, where “thanks to biotechnology, we might design chickens without the unnecessary heads, wings, and tails ... perhaps we could ‘grow’ lamb chops on an infinite production line, ‘with red meat and fat attached to an ever-elongating spine of bone.’”) Rather than becoming the self-realized consciousness of the planet, we are at best clumsy stewards of an “imperfect” nature that we casually alter to suit our own rash desires. More typically, we at our worst act like suicidally destructive aberrations whose lust for reproduction (over 45% of the African population is under 15 years of age) and material gratification will evidently spell the end of most other life forms on Earth.
“The present is an eminently atypical epoch,” McKibben quotes the eminent biologist Dr A J Lotka, in a realization that all aspects of the natural world have been warped by man, from the soil to the sky to the sea. DDT is found in the ice flows of the Arctic Ocean and in the livers of polar bears. A massive hole appears in the stratosphere at the other end of the globe. Our rivers roil with unknowable poisons, while a “dead zone” the size of Alabama spreads through the Gulf of Mexico. The great animals of what was once the most biodiverse era in earth’s long history withdraw (that is, become extinct, as there are no unoccupied niches in nature) before the onslaught of the saw, the torch, and the bulldozer. Our very culture is addicted to a lifestyle that is inherently poisonous to all life—the unliving “metabolism of the Western world,” in the words of George Orwell. Everything on the planet, for millennia to come, will bear the chemical scars of our brief idyll. “A child born now,” states McKibben, “will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring ... he might swim in a stream free of toxic waste, but he won’t ever see a natural stream. If the waves crash up on the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.” Our ten thousand year attempt to raise ourselves above the reddened teeth of our mammalian kin has at last centered upon our teetering enthronement at the fiery crown of creation. We preside today, claims McKibben, over the unmaking of life as we and as all living beings today and in the past have known it to exist.
For all of the persuasive reassurance that we humans are a part of nature, and even that the havoc we wreak today is a component of some grand, inevitable Darwinian scheme, it seems clear that to sanction the continued destruction of biodiversity and planetary health in the current manner is to condone an insidious usurpation of whatever God may be. Or may have been. Perhaps we’ve killed, or are killing, God. McKibben quotes James Lovelock, formulator of the Gaia hypothesis (the world as superorganism), to the effect that our species with its technology is simply an inevitable part of the natural scheme. Hence, nothing we can ever do is “unnatural.” McKibben dismisses this view as apologist semantics: the depth of our disturbance of the natural world is such that “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us -- its separation from human society” (McKibben’s italics). This difference, argues McKibben, is what has led modern humanity to our concurrent pinnacle and perdition: the intelligent (but not wise) desire to control the workings of our planet ... our itching dissatisfaction with what is currently, naturally available.
It is this restless twitching urge to create and destroy that has led modern scientists to think up an array of panaceas for our present CO2-saturated atmosphere, for the hotter summers, fiercer storms and rising seas. McKibben finds these palliatives far from the cutting-edge technology that has brought us to the brink. One “expert” advises us to cover the oceans with white Styrofoam chips in order to “increase the earth’s reflectivity and thus cool its temperature”; another recommends “launching ‘giant orbiting satellites made of thin films’ that could cast shadows on the earth, counteracting the greenhouse effect with a sort of Venetian-blind effect”; a Columbian geochemist proposes employing a “‘fleet of several hundred jumbo jets’ to ferry 35,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere annually to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
McKibben sees these desperate aggrandizements as the false hopes they appear to be. No matter how insane-sounding an idea, whether it’s that the biological ruins we see around us are a “natural result of species selection,” or that we can avoid the cancerous effects of unfiltered sunlight with baseball caps and sunglasses (in the words of former Interior Secretary Donald Hodel), the underlying principle is that we don’t have to change our way of living. This is an eminently handy way of looking at things: if it’s all been decided anyway, by God or Darwin or our political and technological “leaders,” then why worry?
But this is the basic premise of The End of Nature: we cannot count on God or man or our socio-economic system to suddenly wake up and make things right. Things are already so bad now, particularly for the nonhuman life on earth, that if we, you and I, don’t act somehow to change things, radically, then nature will. Through typhoons, naturally, and through drought, famine, and plague. How to help reverse the damage? Carpool to work? Recycle the beer cans? Stop at one kid? Blow up Glen Canyon Dam? The situation seems well nigh hopeless, but readers of this book must ask themselves precisely how they, or their society, would act or would have acted differently if the current knowledge of our self-immolating patterns were known in, say, 1880. Or even 1940. Would we have done anything at all besides follow our established track of gloom and greed and gluttony? The theme of predestined damnation runs black and thick as a syrupy Styx through this extended essay, and the conclusions are not easy to escape or forget.
McKibben rarely goes out on a shaky limb here; he describes himself as a fairly routine homeowner in the Adirondacks who enjoys his car, his woodstove, his computer, and the ready availability of exotic provender at his neighborhood FoodSaver. Here is no wild-eyed wilderness nut who kills his own meat and lives in a rotting hide tipi on the edge of town; nor is he a wide-eyed practitioner of experiential orgiastic rites to honor the Earth Mother. He is one of us … one of the semi-flabby majority with a love of nature that consists chiefly, though not solely, in what he looks out on each day from his study window, and in what he can imagine still lies beyond.
The End of Nature is the most widely reviewed environmental book yet to be written, chiefly because it deals with the sweeping, easily identifiable problems that we all recognize: global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, and overpopulation.
McKibben’s book begins with and remains consistent to its alarming eponymous premise—that humanity and its industrial culture have ended the natural processes of the planet. Period. No matter what enlightened steps are taken to change things now, even if all of the governments of the world suddenly went “eco-fascist” and forced their citizens to radically curb their birth rates, forsake fossil fuels, and return to Neolithic agriculture, the planet’s ecological health will continue to spiral downward at an exponential rate for centuries to come. This is perhaps the most terrifying of McKibben’s several propositions: for all the glib talk today of hydrogen fuel cells and international ozone-control treaties, it is already too late. McKibben states that humanity has stamped its injurious presence over every geophysical aspect of life on Earth, so that “we have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.”
The aggregate harms our species has inflicted on the rest of the world since the Industrial Revolution are difficult to fathom, not to say accept. The author sees an appalling realization of the ignorant power of humanity in the fact that we have actually tampered with the ancient biotic flux of evolution through our anthropogenic atmosphere, just as we have artificially elevated rates of floral and faunal extinction, caused curtains of venomous precipitation to rain down on a waning world, and lately birthed genetically-engineered, essentially man-made domestic animals—monsters. (McKibben presents us with a horrifying spectacle of the full evolution of this new agricultural industry, where “thanks to biotechnology, we might design chickens without the unnecessary heads, wings, and tails ... perhaps we could ‘grow’ lamb chops on an infinite production line, ‘with red meat and fat attached to an ever-elongating spine of bone.’”) Rather than becoming the self-realized consciousness of the planet, we are at best clumsy stewards of an “imperfect” nature that we casually alter to suit our own rash desires. More typically, we at our worst act like suicidally destructive aberrations whose lust for reproduction (over 45% of the African population is under 15 years of age) and material gratification will evidently spell the end of most other life forms on Earth.
“The present is an eminently atypical epoch,” McKibben quotes the eminent biologist Dr A J Lotka, in a realization that all aspects of the natural world have been warped by man, from the soil to the sky to the sea. DDT is found in the ice flows of the Arctic Ocean and in the livers of polar bears. A massive hole appears in the stratosphere at the other end of the globe. Our rivers roil with unknowable poisons, while a “dead zone” the size of Alabama spreads through the Gulf of Mexico. The great animals of what was once the most biodiverse era in earth’s long history withdraw (that is, become extinct, as there are no unoccupied niches in nature) before the onslaught of the saw, the torch, and the bulldozer. Our very culture is addicted to a lifestyle that is inherently poisonous to all life—the unliving “metabolism of the Western world,” in the words of George Orwell. Everything on the planet, for millennia to come, will bear the chemical scars of our brief idyll. “A child born now,” states McKibben, “will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter, or spring ... he might swim in a stream free of toxic waste, but he won’t ever see a natural stream. If the waves crash up on the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born.” Our ten thousand year attempt to raise ourselves above the reddened teeth of our mammalian kin has at last centered upon our teetering enthronement at the fiery crown of creation. We preside today, claims McKibben, over the unmaking of life as we and as all living beings today and in the past have known it to exist.
For all of the persuasive reassurance that we humans are a part of nature, and even that the havoc we wreak today is a component of some grand, inevitable Darwinian scheme, it seems clear that to sanction the continued destruction of biodiversity and planetary health in the current manner is to condone an insidious usurpation of whatever God may be. Or may have been. Perhaps we’ve killed, or are killing, God. McKibben quotes James Lovelock, formulator of the Gaia hypothesis (the world as superorganism), to the effect that our species with its technology is simply an inevitable part of the natural scheme. Hence, nothing we can ever do is “unnatural.” McKibben dismisses this view as apologist semantics: the depth of our disturbance of the natural world is such that “we have ended the thing that has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us -- its separation from human society” (McKibben’s italics). This difference, argues McKibben, is what has led modern humanity to our concurrent pinnacle and perdition: the intelligent (but not wise) desire to control the workings of our planet ... our itching dissatisfaction with what is currently, naturally available.
It is this restless twitching urge to create and destroy that has led modern scientists to think up an array of panaceas for our present CO2-saturated atmosphere, for the hotter summers, fiercer storms and rising seas. McKibben finds these palliatives far from the cutting-edge technology that has brought us to the brink. One “expert” advises us to cover the oceans with white Styrofoam chips in order to “increase the earth’s reflectivity and thus cool its temperature”; another recommends “launching ‘giant orbiting satellites made of thin films’ that could cast shadows on the earth, counteracting the greenhouse effect with a sort of Venetian-blind effect”; a Columbian geochemist proposes employing a “‘fleet of several hundred jumbo jets’ to ferry 35,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere annually to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
McKibben sees these desperate aggrandizements as the false hopes they appear to be. No matter how insane-sounding an idea, whether it’s that the biological ruins we see around us are a “natural result of species selection,” or that we can avoid the cancerous effects of unfiltered sunlight with baseball caps and sunglasses (in the words of former Interior Secretary Donald Hodel), the underlying principle is that we don’t have to change our way of living. This is an eminently handy way of looking at things: if it’s all been decided anyway, by God or Darwin or our political and technological “leaders,” then why worry?
But this is the basic premise of The End of Nature: we cannot count on God or man or our socio-economic system to suddenly wake up and make things right. Things are already so bad now, particularly for the nonhuman life on earth, that if we, you and I, don’t act somehow to change things, radically, then nature will. Through typhoons, naturally, and through drought, famine, and plague. How to help reverse the damage? Carpool to work? Recycle the beer cans? Stop at one kid? Blow up Glen Canyon Dam? The situation seems well nigh hopeless, but readers of this book must ask themselves precisely how they, or their society, would act or would have acted differently if the current knowledge of our self-immolating patterns were known in, say, 1880. Or even 1940. Would we have done anything at all besides follow our established track of gloom and greed and gluttony? The theme of predestined damnation runs black and thick as a syrupy Styx through this extended essay, and the conclusions are not easy to escape or forget.
McKibben rarely goes out on a shaky limb here; he describes himself as a fairly routine homeowner in the Adirondacks who enjoys his car, his woodstove, his computer, and the ready availability of exotic provender at his neighborhood FoodSaver. Here is no wild-eyed wilderness nut who kills his own meat and lives in a rotting hide tipi on the edge of town; nor is he a wide-eyed practitioner of experiential orgiastic rites to honor the Earth Mother. He is one of us … one of the semi-flabby majority with a love of nature that consists chiefly, though not solely, in what he looks out on each day from his study window, and in what he can imagine still lies beyond.
