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| Ecoversity: Recent Books of Note
Eaarth, by Bill McKibben |
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Eaarth
Making a life on a tough new planet Bill McKibben Bill McKibben's latest book is an earnest and important effort to help humanity come to terms with the facts of anthropogenic climate destabilization, to understand and prepare for what will likely happen in the years to come, and to familiarize us with the ways we can already now start building a sustainable future and ameliorating the worst effects of our impacts on Earth systems. If you had to read only one book on climate change, it's consequences for us, and what we can do about it, this is it. (If 2, then include James Hansen's "Storms of My Grandchildren" reviewed below.) Here are some representative passages from "Eaarth": "For the ten thousand years that constitute human civilisation, we've existed in the sweetest of sweet spots. The temperature has barely budged; globally averaged, it's swung in the narrowest of ranges, between 58 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That's warm enough that the ice sheets retreated from the centers of our continents so we could grow grain, but cold enough that mountain glaciers provided drinking and irrigation water to those plains and valleys year round; it was the 'correct' temperature for the marvelously diverse planet that seems right to us. And every aspect of our civilisation reflects that particular world. . . "But we no longer live on that planet. . . the earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans for so long thrived . . . The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has- even if we don't know it yet. We imagine we still live back on that old planet, that the disturbances we see around us are the old random and freakish kind. But they're not. It's a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name. Eaarth. ". . . We'll need to change; to cope with the new Eaarth we've created. We'll need, chief among all things, to get smaller and less centralized, to focus not on growth but on maintenance, on a controlled decline from the perilous heights to which we've climbed . . . The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can't be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage. And in the process, with many others fighting similar battles, we'll help build the architecture for the world that comes next, the dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent. Eaarth represents the deepest of human failures. But we must still live on this world we've created- lightly, carefully, gracefully." - Bill McKibben, Eaarth Return to Recent Books of Note |
Powershift 2011
Watch keynote speeches by Van Jones, Bill McKibben, Tim deChristopher, and Al Gore here.
