The Road to Copenhagen: Book Review of "The End of Nature"

With environmental issues at the forefront of the media's mind these days in the run-up of the Copenhagen conference I decided to read a book that I had been planning on for a while. The book is "The End of Nature" by Bill McKibben and was written in 1989 as a sort of warning about the effect that greenhouse gasses were having on our atmosphere. While he discusses the science at length he attaches a philosophic, almost pseudo religious, meaning to what our emissions have done to the planet.

He argues that we as human beings have a connection to nature that goes beyond just our observations of the trees and flowers. It is the idea of nature existing outside of the power of human control that gives us comfort that there is something larger than ourselves out there. In a sense, even though we may have done something that we regret in our human created world, we can take comfort is escaping to the realm of nature which is pure since human hands have not been involved with it.

As one who has grown up in Upstate New York I believe strongly in this ideal, for I have spent a lot of time hiking and reflecting in the Adirondacks. When I have spent time living in cities, now and when I was in Paris, I find myself yearning to be out amongst nature and to just get out of this human created realm and experience natures calm purity.

The problem that McKibben lays out with this ideal is that it is now fundamentally dead. Most of the environmental problems that we have dealt with in the past have been localized in issue to a specific ecosystem (PCB's in the Hudson River), but climate change affects the entirety of the earth's systems. We are already beginning to see this whether it be through smaller sheep in the isles off the west coast of Scotland, the thinning of Arctic Sea ice, or the migration of mammals north to cooler locals. Thus, nature is no longer free from human influence and is not the pure escape that it once was.

When I walk in the Adirondacks now I may begin to see new species showing up, not because nature intended them to be there, but because humans activities have forced nature into having that animal move there. Nature is no longer a pristine escape.

I feel that McKibben has hit the nail on the head when it comes the philosophical ramifications of our current actions, something that has been largely overlooked when we talk about climate change. The problem is that your average person is either not going to care, or notice, that this shift has taken place. Unless all of the trees in the Adirondacks begin to die because it is getting warmer and invasive parasites begin killing them, people won't notice subtle differences that are occurring. To them, as long as nature looks the same, it won't feel any different due to the fact that they do not see anything different.

Throughout the second half of his book McKibben discusses the long road towards beginning to cap and bring our emissions down. I found it eye opening to see that he was saying the exact same thing twenty years ago as he is now. We literally have progressed very little and emissions have continued to rise in the mean time.

Overall this is a great read and it will change the way that you think about nature, especially due to the fact that we are now responsible for every aspect of it through our actions. I believe that if people thought about nature more then we would begin to form the consensus necessary to pass binding emission reduction targets that will serve to avert the worst possible future scenarios for our planet. Unfortunately, the outlook for this appears to be grim as people continue to just assume that nature will always be there to exploit for our pleasure, whether it is nature in its true form, or our new man made nature.