Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Bill McKibben, Black Inc., $34.99.
An eminent environmentalist, described as the “world’s best green journalist” by Time magazine, writes a powerful call-to-arms.
Thirty years ago, Bill McKibben’s bestselling The End of Nature – long regarded as a classic – was the first book to alert us to global warming. It was not a cheerful book, and sadly its gloom has been vindicated.
Bill’s basic point was “humans had so altered the planet that not an inch was beyond our reach, an idea that scientists underlined a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene”.
Falter is bleak as well. In fact, in some ways it’s “bleaker because more time has passed and we are deeper in the hole. It offers an account of how the climate crisis has progressed and of the new technological developments in fields such as artificial intelligence that also seem to me to threaten a human future. Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experience is now in question. The stakes feel very high, and the odds very long, and the trends very ominous”.
Trends of a new nature have arisen, along with a sense of being less grim than in “my younger days”. Climate change, robotics and artificial intelligence may spell the end of humanity as we know it, that is, unless we act now.
The book ends with a “conviction that resistance to dangers is at least possible, stemming from human ingenuity – watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. There are movements for change as well. He offers hope, living in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered writing what follows”.
This is a rousing and lucid guide to saving not only our planet, but also our humanity.
