book analysis
The End of NatureNavigating the site:
Bill McKibben a founder of anti-global warming organization 350.org
“There are plants on this earth as old as civilization. Not species – individual plants.”
4
| Contents | PART | Pages |
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xv |
||
| Part I | The Present | |
|
3 |
||
|
47 |
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| Part II | The Near Future | |
|
95 |
||
|
139 |
||
|
171 |
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, (New York: Anchor Books, 1989; 1999 edition).
Are we aware enough to realize and respond to the facts that we have purchased our extinction?
“we live in the oddest moment since our species first
stood upright, the moment when we are finally grown so big in numbers
and in appetites that we alter everything around us. Those numbers demonstrate
the end of nature as an independent force something larger than us.”
xv-xvi
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness:
“—the Earth has become abstract, and the economy
concrete, to us.”
“roused from our consumer enchantment”
“So far
these floods and forest fires and heat waves don’t seem to be spurring
much demand for change. One reason may be the intuitive sense that in
some ways it is too late to do anything about it at all--….In a way,
this intuition is completely correct: its far too late to stop global
warming. All we can do is make it less bad than it will otherwise be.”
xxiii
“The scariest
part of the chemistry of global warming involves ‘feedback loops’
– the idea that as you raise the temperature you cause changes that
will raise the temperature even more."
“we need
to figure out how to make ourselves smaller, less central.”
xxiv
“the sadness
that drove me to write this book in the first place has not really lifted.”
“We didn't create this world, but we are busy decreating it.”
“This buzzing, blooming, mysterious, cruel, lovely globe of mountain, sea, city forest; of fish and wolf and bug and man; of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen – it has come unbalanced in out short moment on it. Its mostly us now.”
xxv
His argument:
Human activity has become a killer; the planet’s nature is so altered from what it long has been that wildness is dead.
Three contributing problems to consider as the cause of
the murder:
A. People's needs for food, clothing, shelter, & security
B. Technical conveniences destroy UV radiation screen.C.1 Burning coal for electricity & petrol for cars generates acid rain
C.2 Fossil fuels cause Global Warming, (Greenhouse gas pollution).
Spencer Weart | Gale Christianson | James Hansen | Contemporary
McKibben's idea | McKibben summary | What is wild? | Question | Evidence
