McKibben’s new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet will rock your world! As one reviewer aptly said, “It will knock you down and pick you up.” While his early work was a warning, this is a report from the field that chronicles the devastation that we have sustained in the past 20 years. An extremely important book that brings you up to date on how bad things are, it also offers a lot of hope, but not quite what you would wish for.
The dust jacket warns, “Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in ways no human has ever seen. We’ve created, in short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.”
This severely challenged Eaarth will require vast sums to repair and restore, sums that depend on a stable planet for economic growth. And by the way, that stability is gone!
In April, 2010 alone, we had the volcanic eruption from Iceland that shut down half the airports in Europe, a “thousand year flood” in Nashville, Tennessee and the mother of all oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico, an event that already seems to be the greatest man-made catastrophe ever.
McKibben’s argument is that we can’t rely on old ways to solve these new, overwhelming problems. Towards the end of the first chapter, he summarizes, “The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun… We may, with commitment and luck, be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew – the only earth that we ever knew – is gone.”
If this sounds like one of those early Star Trek movies where they land on a harsh and unpredictable planet, well that’s how it is. Before you get out the razor blades, let me say this is an inspiring book that weaves the zoom and boom in with the doom and gloom. You do, however, have to read it all the way through.
What does he recommend? That we scale way back, focus on essentials, become much more self-reliant, learn to rebuild soil, grow much more of our own food, think and live locally, work with our neighborhoods and community, get smaller and less centralized, “focus not on growth but maintenance on a controlled decline from the perilous heights to which we climbed.” To put it another way, we now have to hunker down to survive on a world that is violently out of balance.
I don’t remember much political discussion in the book, but unless we put an end to the kleptocracy that is running and ruining this state and country, we will keep getting screwed by the mega scams designed to rip us off while raping the planet. As the “too big to fail” operations keep failing, we need to make radical changes to save ourselves and our country.
It’s hard not to quote the whole book – it’s that brilliant. He ends the last chapter saying, “The momentum of the heating… and 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…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 still must live on the world we’ve created – lightly, carefully, gracefully.”
Please buy it, read it, tell your friends about it, and consider what actions you and we can take so that we can live on this island “lightly, carefully, gracefully.”
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