Eaarth
Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Twenty years ago, in The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he argues, we need to acknowledge that we’ve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already underway. Our old familiar planet is melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in ways humans have never seen. We’ve created a new planet, still recognisable but fundamentally different. In Eaarth, McKibben surveys the changes already taking place and considers what they will mean for our future.
Adapting to our new home won’t be easy. It will be expensive – and the natural resources on which our economy is built have been damaged and degraded. Our survival depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back, concentrating on essentials and creating the kinds of communities that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change – fundamental change – will be our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The world as we know it has ended forever: that's the melancholy message of this nonetheless cautiously optimistic assessment of the planet's future by McKibben, whose The End of Nature first warned of global warming's inevitable impact 20 years ago. Twelve books later, the committed environmentalist concedes that the earth has lost "the climatic stability that marked all of human civilization." His litany of damage done by a carbon-fueled world economy is by now familiar: in some places rainfall is dramatically heavier, while Australia and the American Southwest face a permanent drought; polar ice is vanishing, glaciers everywhere are melting, typhoons and hurricanes are fiercer, and the oceans are more acidic; food yields are dropping as temperatures rise and mosquitoes in expanding tropical zones are delivering deadly disease to millions. McKibben's prescription for coping on our new earth is to adopt "maintenance as our mantra," to think locally not globally, and to learn to live "lightly, carefully, gracefully" a glass-half-full attitude that might strike some as Pollyannaish or merely insufficient. But for others McKibben's refusal to abandon hope may restore faith in the future.
