The End of Nature

"This is the fundamental environmental book. It’s either this or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . I considered it, but much of the material in Silent Spring is dated now – although some of it isn’t, and the book absolutely drove environmental change. It was also written from a slightly different perspective, because it focused on pollution, particularly the way the overuse of DDT was killing birds. So I’ve chosen The End of Nature because it’s the fundamental book about the global planetary change that we’re undergoing. McKibben talks about global warming, extinction rates, pollution, all of these things. This was before anyone came up with the idea of the Anthropocene, so it really was before its time. It was a very early take on the concept. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter McKibben is saying that we are destroying nature. It’s interesting, but I don’t agree with all of it. For example, the book is very much about humans versus nature. But we are obviously part of nature, there’s nothing artificial about us in that sense. And we rely on nature for everything, to clean our water, and to provide our food, all our materials, everything. So we are of nature, but we also hold the natural world’s destiny in our hands at the moment. So there’s this antagonism, are we natural, are we not? McKibben doesn’t really address that but what he does say is that we are causing enormous amounts of damage to ecosystems around the planet, which we are. He’s Christian. Normally with a science book you don’t know if a writer is religious or not, or if you do it’s certainly not part of the writing. McKibben doesn’t make heavy work of this at all, but it is somehow infused in the writing so you are aware of it and he does explicitly say this in places. I think this makes him quite unusual. Most people writing in this field are either academics, physicists or biologists, from communities in which it is almost frowned upon to discuss your religious beliefs, or they are environmental journalists, who are almost entirely not religious."