The End of Nature. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1989 by Gregg Easterbrook

ON POLITICAL BOOKS IT' NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE

The End of Nature (*1) has become, prior to publication, one of the fall's big books principally on the expectation that it will argue that everything about the environment is horrifying beyond reprieve, a thought that packages well, and appeals to media bookers. It is being promoted as The Fate of the Earth comes to the environment. The End of Nature has little relation with the hype package that accompanies it. The book does not call the earth doomed, though McKibben, a former New Yorker writer who specializes in environmental affairs, is glum about several currentecological trends, particularly global warming. Nor will readers find it a brooding, strident tract. The End of Nature is instead a gentle, splendid book written in an unfailingly reasonable tone, enriched by many touches of warmth and affectionate wit.

"If the temperature [is] increasing a degree per decade," McKibben writes, "the forest surrounding my [northern New York State] home would be due at the Canadian border sometime around 2020." And McKibben calls Thomas Midgley, the General Motors chemist who invented both chlorofluorocarbons and tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, the one "who may now hold the record for most banned substances produced by a singled man." He devotes a delightful paragraph to military ruminations over whether global warming, by shrinking the polar ice cap that Soviet nuclear missile submarine use for cover, will confer an advantage on the U.S.

Parts of The End of Nature were composed during the 1988 summer heat wave and thus reflect last year's conventional wisdom that 1988 marked the beginning of the end. Since the book went to press during an unusually cool summer, it probably will be needled in some quarters on the contention that 1989 debunks the greenhouse effect, though statistically neither year proves either case.

Conventional wisdom does sometimes handicap McKibben's thinking. He repeatedly declares that weather changes are "permanent" or "irrevocable," that "no normal situation" can ever return. These assertions fit squarely in the cultural tradition of success-through-doomsday prophecy, but I found them hard to swallow even as a believer that the greenhouse effect is a genuine cause for alarm. On global warming and ozone layer depletion, McKibben believes that all negative environmental and social trends in effect today are unalterable and can be reliably projected out into the future, while discarding the possibility that new ideas, inventions, social norms, or natural phenomena will rise up in opposition.

In the main, however, The End of Nature takes an admirably nuanced view of the earth's affairs. McKibben is careful to acknowledge the arguments against environmental panic, and extreme sacrilege among environmentalists, and he shows charity toward the great mass of humanity that generates the core problem, whereas most environmental writing perches on the notion that all except the eco-enlightened are mosters and oafs.

The "end of nature" that the author decrees--he says it's already occurred--does not mean destruction of the ecosphere or cessation of life but rather the passing of earth's temporal arrangements as they have arisen spontaneously, unperturbed by conscious design. McKibben says, for example, that although many of the forests man has cut may someday be replanted, they can never again be "natural"--the next generation of redwoods will grow in neat rows, plunked down by mechanical planters, instead of springing up at random. He posits, grudgingly, that global warming and ozone depletion might be controlled by technology. But to McKibben, the thought of such "ecological management" is abhorrent, since even if successful it would still be artificial. "Environmentally sound is not the same as natural," he protests, objecting also to hydroelectric power, the most benign form of power available to current society. Hydro reservoirs in Quebec "have altered an area larger than Switzerland," McKibben writes disdainfully, with the simple fact of alteration being damning to him. This leads to the first of three shortcomings in McKibben's analysis.

To gator glory

First he argues, in effect, that for most of the ecosphere only pure preservation--not building or moving a thing--would have been responsible on man's part. But since for a substantial portion of the world's surface the opportunity for pure preservation passed long ago, this is little more useful than arguing that Europe would be a nicer place to live if Napoleon had not started his wars. The End of Nature accepts that cleanups and restoration projects mean little because, once land or water has been touched by man, it is impossible to return to the metaphysically superior "nature" state. Perhaps. But here McKibben has inadvertently provided an argument that we might as well go on paving. If nature is already ruined for good, why shouldn't humans amuse themselves by doing as they please to the landscape?