The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. 

2/5 rating. 

Book #140 of 2019. Read December 9, 2019.

This book is a classic about global warming. As such, I wanted soooo bad to like it, but just couldn’t get into it.

This book has some interesting ideas and was certainly powerful as one of the first books bringing climate change to the forefront of the public. Bill basically puts forth that because of the excesses of humans, we have been pushed over the precipice and into a time when nature is dead. He does not mean this in the sense that trees or frogs are dead (though many are dying because of our impacts on their environments), but that there is no such thing as nature apart from humans anymore. Every bit of this earth has been affected by humans. This sad fact requires massive changes in our thoughts about energy, pollution, and nature. Maybe even more important than this, it requires us to re-evaluate our priorities and see that acquiring things, and flippant waste is certainly not why humans are on this earth.

If you have read the above paragraph, you have understood the whole premise of the book and can skip reading it and use the time you saved to maybe change the world! Bill tells us we really screwed up our world…but that’s about it, I thought maybe he’d tell us what to do, but no such luck.

Quotes:

“By now, the studies on global warming would fill an airplane hangar. Postdocs have tapped into tundra, overflown rain forests, launched satellites, collected ancient pollen, counted tree rings, cored ice sheets, floated weather balloons, sent sound waves across entire oceans. Unlike the politicians, they really have worked overtime.”

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