Content area
Full Text
Bill McKibben is the literary face of popular American environmentalism. Perhaps no modern writer so consistently transforms serious environmental issues into best sellers. His books are formulaic, but the formula works. Consisting of four or five relatively short and breezy chapters, they are, in effect, expanded New Yorker essays. The most recent (with their notes and acknowledgments) run from 232 pages to 255 pages. They introduce a problem in the first chapter, usually with an anecdote involving Bill McKibben. In the next two chapters McKibben discusses the problem in the chatty way that makes so much popular American writing sound like a talk-show transcript. He proposes a solution in chapter four, and argues for it in a short chapter five. The books are smart but never difficult. There is rarely anything in them that makes you pause for a moment and think about what you just read. Read together, however, there is a trajectory to them that offers much to think about.
Beginning with The End of Nature (1989), then resuming with Enough (2003), Deep Economy (2007), eaarth (2010), and his edited volume for The Library of America titled American Earth (2008), McKibben has made nature, and particularly climate change, a staple of his literary enterprise. However, he is not primarily a nature writer. Nature is a means to his larger end: the exploration of the meaning of being human. His lodestone is authenticity, which he defines largely in terms of the natural. The subjects of his books are those things that threaten authenticity: climate change, which represents "the end of nature"; genetic engineering, which threatens to bring the end of the human; and the confusion of human well-being with consumption. All of these things may make finding meaning impossible, because they "tamper with our identity at a level deep enough to matter."
McKibben teaches at a college, but he is not a scholar and does not intend to be one. He is a journalist, a popular writer, and a critic, who filters his material through American popular culture. He has a distinguished intellectual lineage that stretches back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher. Emerson, surprisingly, does not appear in American Earth, McKibben's edited volume of nature writing, but including Emerson would have...