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Bill McKibben

The End of Nature Paperback – June 13, 2006

by Bill McKibben (Author)

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Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth.

This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement.

More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date

June 13, 2006
Dimensions

5.09 x 0.51 x 7.96 inches
ISBN-10

9780812976083
ISBN-13

978-0812976083
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Editorial Reviews

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"Whatever we once thought Nature was--wildness, God, a simple place free from human thumbprints, or an intricate machinery sustaining life on Earth--we have now given it a kick that will change it forever. Humanity has stepped across a threshold. In his free-ranging and provocative book, Bill McKibben explores the philosophies and technologies that have brought us here, and he shows how final a crossing we have made." --James Gleick, author of Chaos

About the Author

Bill McKibben has written several hundred pieces for The New Yorker. His writings on nature have also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other national publications. He and his wife live in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nature, we believe, takes forever.  It moves with infinite slowness throught the many periods of its history, whose names we dimly recall from high school biology - the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene.  Ever since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path.  "So slowly, oh, so slowly have the great changes been brought about," wrote John Burroughs at the turn of the century.  "The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to a powder by allowing a gauze veil t o float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will have only just begun.  Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow."  We have been told that man's tenure is as a minute to the earth's day, but it is that vast day which has lodged in our minds.  The age of the trilobites began some 600 million years ago.  The dinosaurs lived for nearly 140 million years.  Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is:  Nothinkg happens quickly.  Change takes unimaginable - "geologic"- time.

This idea about time is essentially mistaken.  Muddled though they are scientifically, the creationists, believing in the sudden appearance of hte earth some seven thousand years ago, may intuitively understand more about hte progress of time than hte rest of us.  For the world as we know it - that is, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, the world in which North America, Europe, and much of the rest of the planet are warm enough to support large human populations - is of quite comprehensible duration.  People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some ten or twelve thousand years ago.  Using thirty years as a generation, that is three hundred and thirty to four hundred generations ago.  Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations in my family - I have seen photos of four.  That is, I can think back nearly one-sixtieth of the way to the start of civilization.  A skilled geneaologist might get me one-thirtieth of the distance back.  And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived.  From the work of archaeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the pharaohs, which is more than a third of the way. Two hundred and sixty-five generations ago Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls.  Two hundred and sixty-five is a large number, but not in the way that six million is a large number - not inscrutably large.

Or look at it this way: There are plants on this earth as old as civilization.  Not species - individual plants.  The General Sherman tree in California's Sequoia National Park may be a third as old, about four thousand years.  Certain Antarctic lichens date back ten thousand years.  A specific creosote plant in the Southwestern desert was estimated recently to be 11,700 years of age.

And within that ten or twelve thousand years of civilization, of course, time is not uniform.  The world as we really, really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution.  the world we actually feel comfortable in dates back to perhaps 1945.  It was not until after World War II, for instance, that plastics came into widespread use.

In other words, our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion.  True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously.  Events, enormous events, can happen quickly.  We've known this to be true since Hiroshima, of course, but I don't mean that quickly.  I mean that over a year or a decade or a lifetime big and impersonal and dramatic changes can take place.  We're now comfortable with the bizarre idea that continents can drift over eons, or that continent can die in an atomic second; even so, normal time seems to us immune to such huge changes.  It isn't, though.  In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than 10 percent, from about 315 to more than 350 parts per million.  In the last decade, an immense "hole" in the ozone layer has opened above  the South Pole.  In the last half-decade, the percentage of West German forests damaged by acid rain has risen from less than 10 to more than 50.  According to the Worldwatch Institute, in 1988 - for perhaps the first time since that starved Pilgrim winter at Plymouth - America ate more food than it grew.  Burroughs again:  "One summer day, while I was walking along the country rode on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down.  Amid the general stillness and immobility around me, the effect was quite startling ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the wall.  A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest."

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0812976088
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks (June 13, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780812976083
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812976083
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.09 x 0.51 x 7.96 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #234,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #196 in Nature Writing & Essays
- #317 in Environmental Science (Books)
- #364 in Environmentalism

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Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and numerous other books. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, and was among the first to warn of the dangers of global warming. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

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Terrific Explanantion Of Forces Leading to Global Warming!

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2001

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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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Arthur Digbee

The central idea is right but it rambles and has too much filler

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2009

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This version is a reprint of McKibben's 1989 book, with a new introduction. The dates are a bit jarring because he regularly refers to "President Bush"- - meaning the first one, though this reprint appeared during the presidency of the second one. Much of the book takes the unseasonably hot, dry year of 1988 as its point of reference, but that reference has not really aged well.

This was one of the first books to warn the general public about climate change. It began as an essay in _The New Yorker_, which McKibben later expanded. Unfortunately, it tends to read this way still, with a lot of filler and repetition instead of a nice tight argument.

McKibben really has three different ideas of the "end of nature," which he doesn't distinguish. The first is the notion that humans have developed the entire world to our use, leaving only scattered "wilderness" areas. Environmentalists fight to save these but they are already so constrained by humans around them that they are no longer really "nature." Second is the notion that human climate change means that temperature, precipitation, and everything else is affected by human activity and is therefore metaphysically not "natural," losing meaning thereby. I'm not convinced that this is how people experience rain. The third "end of nature" is McKibben's prediction that humans will use genetic engineering to try to escape the consequences of destroying the planet, so that we will have genetically-engineered fauna and flora even in whatever wild places remain. This is the genesis of his more recent book, "Enough," which I preferred to this one.

Mixing these three ideas together willy-nilly doesn't really work, and I wish McKibben had seen more clearly that he was talking about several different things. These three ideas also differ in terms of philosophical meaning as well as the political and economic forces pressing us to end nature.

Yet, behind the entire book is the forceful insistence that there are too many humans, using too many resources, unable to slow down even if we wanted to. That is surely right, and this book makes the depressing point well. The twenty years that have passed since the first edition only confirm that McKibben's main theme retains is force.

8 people found this helpful

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Can we save the Earth? Maybe

Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2013

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Mr. McKibben's book demonstrates clearly how humans have rushed headlong into "improving" our mode of living and created massive injury to our homeplace: Earth. Hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis larger, more numerous and more destructive than we have ever seen before are showing us - if we are not too blind to see - that we are creating crises with ever-increasing speed. Earthquakes in places we have never seen before, huge oil and sludge spills that are killing our wildlife, destroying .our vegetation, making neighborhoods unlivable in the foreseeable future: all are eloquent signals that we have no choice but to change our thinking and our behavior.

This destruction did not begin in our century. It has merely picked up increasingly more speed as we go. Nature has been reliable in spite of our unreliability toward nature. We've never seen a living passenger pigeon, because it was made extinct by hunters more than a hundred years ago. Our salmon, trying to swim upriver to spawn, are running into dams that stop them. Some of us remember DDT. It was banned in this country decades ago, but we are still living with the consequences, with some birds' eggs with such thin shells that they are crushed before they can be hatched. Soon after WWII pregnant women were giving birth to deformed babies. Many of those babies died.

The time has come to recognize our failing condition and change now.

Mr. McKibben has spoken,eloquently .

8 people found this helpful

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Ian Robertson

A Warning about Warming

Reviewed in Canada on August 13, 2017

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Bill McKibben has become a force in the environmental movement through his writing and his leadership at the climate change advocacy and activism organization ‘350.org’. His first book, The End of Nature, is an important call to action to combat climate change, and a natural successor to Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring , which focused more narrowly on the impact of pesticides on the environment. McKibben’s book is, given the additional twenty years of environmental impact studies and the emerging understanding of human caused climate change, appropriately broader in scope than is Carson’s. It is also, given its broad scope based upon emerging science, a less focused and more aspirational call to action than Carson’s pesticide-based alarm bell.

For example, when the book was first published there still existed scientific debate about whether the climate was warming or cooling, and though McKibben gives space to both points of view, distilling the key points from reputable scientific bodies (NASA, NOAA, various universities) he leans towards the warming trend. We know now that climate change is a more apt description than global warming, because the latter implies to most that it will be a gradual increase with similar impact everywhere - consistent with McKibben's linear examples - and not the unpredictable and variable impact we are currently experiencing. (For example, due to oceanic and atmospheric patterns, sea level increases have been shown to be localized and much larger around Florida and the Carolinas than in many other areas).

Despite his caution that the subject is complex, and that the outcomes are wildly uncertain, McKibben nonetheless resorts often to simple cause and effect examples, such as "The ocean rises; I build a wall; the marsh dies, and, with it, the fish." In fact, McKibben does this so often that The End of Nature at times almost verges on speculative fiction, something better left to Margaret Atwood (see for example, The Handmaid's Tale ).

Written 30 years ago, the book is also a bit dated in its examples, and in its repeated references to nuclear weapons - a threat which hasn't diminished (perhaps even increased with the rise of certain rogue states), but which has generally shifted from an awestruck horror to a grudging acceptance within society. Still, though they are dated, the nuclear references are natural and appropriate comparators to our potential destruction of nature. And on another front McKibben is ahead of the curve warning that our prolific genetic engineering is a looming, additional End of Nature.

There are many biblical references in book, which is a bit surprising for a secular subject and a pluralistic audience, though perhaps that's just a sign of the book's age. The effect is a subtle yearning for a lost era – not just for when our environmental footprint didn’t loom so large, but also for when a Western European ethos ruled in America.

The quibbles noted above are minor, though, and can be forgiven as the message McKibben delivers has only become more important over the past 30 years. The End of Nature is an important call to action from an important environmental figure. It should be read today by all with an interest in the environmental movement and the signature works that have helped advance the cause.

Prince D.

It need some maturity about climate change.

Reviewed in India on November 24, 2020

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You have to be a well read about climate change.
If this is among your first five books about climate change than i will say that it is premature to read it.
It need some maturity about climate change.

Lyle Decaire

Well written but over optimistic.

Reviewed in Canada on May 11, 2014

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For the time period this book was written it was a good reflection of what nature was facing from the onslaught of human progress. Since then the assault has become more intense and the results are more damaging and far reaching than even Mr. McKibben could have foreseen.

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Tara Chand Saini

ultimate. must be read everyone for save the Earth ...

Reviewed in India on October 23, 2015

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ultimate. must be read everyone for save the Earth.

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