Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature has been called the first book on climate change written for the general public, and its purpose – to tell people just how bad global warming will be for the world so that they go and do something about it – seems tragically naive with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight. McKibben’s plea is for mankind to leave the natural world alone by limiting our incessant expansion and consumption, because pollution and the greenhouse effect are threats that the planet might not recover from. And so it must be protected through law, and by limiting the growth of polluting industries particularly and the civilised world’s exponential growth generally, before the balance between man and nature tips too far the wrong way. It is not an easy message to swallow when much of the current thinking is that, actually, human progress and industry can continue if it happens in a non-polluting, less resource-hungry way. But the core warning about the consequence of inaction remains as stark as ever.
further reading…
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature has been called the first book on climate change written for the general public, and its purpose – to tell people just how bad global warming will be for the world so that they go and do something about it – seems tragically naive with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight. McKibben’s plea is for mankind to leave the natural world alone by limiting our incessant expansion and consumption, because pollution and the greenhouse effect are threats that the planet might not recover from. And so it must be protected through law, and by limiting the growth of polluting industries particularly and the civilised world’s exponential growth generally, before the balance between man and nature tips too far the wrong way. It is not an easy message to swallow when much of the current thinking is that, actually, human progress and industry can continue if it happens in a non-polluting, less resource-hungry way. But the core warning about the consequence of inaction remains as stark as ever.