The End Of Nature Summary

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You had to wonder when it would happen. When someone would actually take a stand on all the things in our world, all the bad things that are happening. The climate change, the melting of the polar ice caps, and everything in between. Figures it would be Bill McKibben. His first book, The End of Nature was a book about global warming, one of the first of his time. His latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Hot New Planet, lays out our grim new reality relentlessly “We need now to understand the world we’ve created” (McKibben). Yet it is not, fundamentally, a negative book. Mckibben’s view is, that we’re already on a new and different planet just as surely as if we’d boarded a spaceship and arrived at a new world, is presented convincingly. …show more content…
As we have studied in class, coal factoriers are a major problem in the world today. We use all of these natural resources that are just at our fingertips but we do not realize that how and when we use these resources they tear down our economy in a very fast way. Besides, it appears that people are just another factor in the tearing down of our world. In describing how we’ve completely overshot any hope of preserving the old Earth, McKibben almost makes a mockery by saying “We have, in short, goosed our economy with one jolt of Viagra after another, anything to avoid facing the fact that our reproductive days were passed, and hence constant and unrelenting thrust was no longer so necessary.” Or take this passage, where he references the whole consumer excess that brought us to Eaarth when he notes the effect of $4.00 a gallon gas “Suddenly, in fact, you felt a little less confident that you were an Explorer, a Navigator, a Forrester, a Mountaineer, a Scout, a Tracker, a Trooper, a Wrangler, a Pathfinder, a Trailblazer. You all of a sudden were in Kansas or maybe in New Rochelle… Discovery and Escape and Excursion suddenly seemed less important than the buzz-killing fact that it took a hundred bucks to fill the tank.” Yes, he actually entertains us while …show more content…
That would mean we weren't headed for a warmer planet--one that McKibben calls Eaarth (the extra a is for extra awful)--that will be profoundly more difficult to live on. But our fate is sealed: "Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality." McKibben backs up his claim with page after page detailing the impact that global warming has already had, from the fast-melting Arctic to the expanding tropics. Eventually the litany becomes numbing, but that's McKibben's goal--to wear you down with facts until the full force of what we've done to the planet becomes unmistakable. What really sets Eaarth apart from other green books is McKibben's prescription for survival. This won't be just a matter of replacing a few lightbulbs; McKibben is calling for a more local existence lived "lightly, carefully, gently." It's a future unimaginable to most of us--but it may be the only way to
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