The Future Is Now

ENVIRONMENT The Future Is Now EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Bill McKibben. xviii + 253 pp. Times Books, 2010. $24.

In 1989 Bill McKibben published The * End of Nature, which is widely regarded as the first book on global climate change to be addressed to a general authence. The profound effect of that text on public consciousness came less from the environmental science it contained than from the disturbing central idea it conveyed: What we used to call "nature" is now so thoroughly conditioned by anthropogenic forces that the concept of nature as outside of human influence is already archaic, a sentimental relic of a preindustrial past. When we gaze at a river, or a cloud, or a puddle of rain, McKibben argued compellingly, we are now observing something that is, at least in part, a product of human culture. Even weather and climate, he claimed, were being shaped by the environmental consequences of a global, fossil-fuelconsuming economic system.

That was more than 20 years ago, and although the disconcerting reality of climate change is now old news, the new arid more distressing news is how quickly it is proceeding and how little we have done to effectively address the problem. Enter Eaarth, McKibben's most recent and most strident attempt to awaken readers to a postnatural world in which the effects of global warming are considerably worse than was predicted several decades ago. Just as the essential stratagem of The End of Nature was the claim that nature outside human influence was gone forever, the corollary gambit of Eaarth is the assertion that the planet we most fear - a planet on which the devastating effects of global warming are changing the fabric of our ecosystems, weather, agriailture and economy - is in fact the planet on which we already live. McKibben's use of the odd spelling "Eaarth" is intended to distinguish this "tough new planet" (as he cans, it...