Bill McKibben’s book is a soulful, poetic lament for something irreversibly lost in nature—but also a call to action that is in its own way stubbornly hopeful. Even those of us who are genuinely concerned about global warming find ourselves taking solace in just how long the Earth has been around, the changes it’s weathered, the vast sweep of evolution.
This is a false solace, the author argues. McKibben, a peerless writer Time magazine calls “the world’s best green journalist,” in The End of Nature he presents a devastating case for the global warming we’ve experienced to date, and an even more devastating case for what’s to come if we don’t fundamentally reorder our lives. I deeply respect McKibben’s dogged devotion to this mission — he’s been at it since before Al Gore brought much of it to the limelight. Originally published in 1989, the book is now an even more powerful call to facing the environmental realities of climate change.
