Media Influences: The End of Nature

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Media Influences: The End of Nature

Introduction

The End of Nature is a book by American environmental activist Bill McKibben (1960–) that first appeared in 1989. It was the first book for a popular audience proclaiming that human beings are changing global climate and calling for reduced emissions of greenhouse gases. The book has influenced much later thought and writing on the subject of climate change and was a precursor to other popular works such as former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's Academy Award-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and best-selling book of the same name.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

Bill McKibben was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1960 and grew up in a suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts. After high school he attended Harvard University, where he edited the college's daily newspaper. He then moved to New York City to work for the influential weekly magazine the New Yorker. At first, McKibben wrote short gossipy pieces about the affairs of New York City. Then he hit upon the idea of writing a piece based on tracing the source of every pipe and wire in his

apartment back to its origins (or to the origins of the fuel or electricity it carried).

Funded by the New Yorker, he traveled to the jungles of Brazil, a gas well in the Gulf of Mexico, a uranium mine in the Grand Canyon, and a hydroelectric dam in Quebec, Canada. The experience transformed McKibben's thinking, alerting him to the fact that even the mightiest cities were dependent on the physical world. After his editor was fired, McKibben quit the magazine and moved to the Adirondack Mountains in upper New York State. He spent his days exploring the woods, “falling in love with the real world,” as he put it in a 2005 article.

During the 1980s, scientific predictions of global warming became more definite. McKibben read about these predictions during the extraordinarily hot summer of 1988. After seeing NASA scientist James Hansen testify before the Senate committee on global warming, convened by Senator Al Gore (D-TN), McKibben was sad and angry. He later said that the core idea of The End of Nature, expressed in Chapter 2 of the book, was “written in my brain in a matter of moments,” namely that “for the first time, human beings were managing to alter and degrade everything around us, that our impact on the environment, which before had ended at the edges of our villages or the margin of our fields, was now ubiquitous.”

In his view, the very idea of a place untouched by human beings had become impossible: climate change was everywhere. Nature as an independent entity was ending—and that, McKibben argued in his book, “is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning.” It was in this sense that climate change spelled “the end of Nature.”

McKibben wrote a long piece about his insight that was serialized in The New Yorker and then published as a book by Random House in 1989. The book was reviewed respectfully in major outlets such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Nicholas Wade wrote in the Times that although it would be easy to dismiss McKibben's book as old news or mere manipulation of the greenhouse-warming issue, “all such pretexts for dismissing the book would be easy ways of avoiding the hard questions it raises.” He added that McKibben “speaks in a measured and civilized voice that deserves a hearing.” The book was soon translated into nearly 20 languages.

Impacts and Issues

Apart from the many critics who attacked the central scientific claims of the book—long since vindicated— others, typically from academic backgrounds, criticized the book's thesis that nature is something independent from human beings. Human beings are natural, too, these critics argued: we are not separate from nature, and “nature” includes all the changes we make to the world around us.

For example, American journalism professor Michael Pollan wrote in 1995 that The End of Nature was “an improbable salad of popular science and apocalypse” and that “what McKibben was really mourning was not the end of nature per se, but the end of a certain romantic and scientifically meaningless idea of nature conceived as the pristine opposite of culture, as ‘the world apart from man.’” In 2005, McKibben said that he understood and accepted Pollan's challenge, “yet [I] continue to think that my original idea is also correct and crucial,” for “our minds allowed us to dominate [Nature] in new ways and to decide not to dominate it.”

WORDS TO KNOW

CLIMATE CHANGE: Sometimes used to refer to all forms of climatic inconsistency, but because Earth's climate is never static, the term is more properly used to imply a significant change from one climatic condition to another. In some cases, climate change has been used synonymously with the term, global warming; scientists, however, tend to use the term in the wider sense to also include natural changes in climate.

GREENHOUSE GASES: Gases that cause Earth to retain more thermal energy by absorbing infrared light emitted by Earth's surface. The most important greenhouse gases are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and various artificial chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons. All but the latter are naturally occurring, but human activity over the last several centuries has significantly increased the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in Earth's atmosphere, causing global warming and global climate change.

UBIQUITOUS: Present more or less everywhere in a certain region. One might say, for example, that “in North American ecosystems, mice are ubiqutous.”

McKibben has remained active as a climate-change activist. In 2006, he led a five-day walk across Vermont, probably the largest U.S. public protest focused on climate change up to that time. The next year he issued an online call for local demonstrations demanding action on climate change, called Step It Up 2007. About 1,400 demonstrations took place on April 14, 2007, followed by a second round on November 2, 2007. McKibben has written a number of books in addition to The End of Nature, including a guide for climate change activism. Among his other works are: Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

See Also Public Opinion.