The End of Nature

This book changed the way I think about nature. If humanity can change the atmosphere, there is no longer a “natural world” untouched by human hands.

After reading it, I realized that we can no longer leave it to “nature” to solve problems like climate change; we, human society, must step into the breach and take responsibility for the problem. Leaving things to nature is no longer enough.

I love this book, another classic, partly because it was the first shocking explanation for a general audience of the “greenhouse effect” (as global warming was called in 1989) and what it would mean for our future.

I also love McKibben’s ability to synthesize narrative and data from all over the world and multiple branches of science. He was warning us about an existential threat long before most of the public understood it.

McKibben is an American journalist, researcher, and founder of the environmental organization 350.org. His End of Nature is one of the first trade books to address climate change. Written in clear, accessible language, McKibben argues that nature has been thoroughly subjected to human forces that forever undermine traditional views of an environment set apart, pristine and original, from the things we have done to it. The biggest thing we’ve done is increase the average temperature above industrial norms, and this book is a classic framing of this issue. 

McKibben started covering climate change for the New Yorker in the late 1980s. The title of his 1989 The End of Nature encompasses the idea that if we were to finish what we started with greenhouse gasses, nothing would be “natural” anymore. McKibben considered the subject so important that he has continued to speak and organize about it ever since. This book reminds us that we knew enough three decades ago to act. The ensuing delay was a deeply cynical and ultimately fatal mix of propaganda designed to give the impression that climate change was scientifically questionable or controversial, produced… show more.