The Future Is Now EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
Bill McKibben. xviii + 253 pp. Times Books, 2010. $24. In 1989
Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, which is widely
regarded as the first book on global climate change to be
addressed to a general audience. The profound effect of that
text on public consciousness came less from the environmental
science it contained than from the disturbing central idea it
conveyed: What we used to call “nature” is now so thoroughly
conditioned by anthropogenic forces that the concept of nature
as outside of human influence is already archaic, a sentimental
relic of a preindustrial past. When we gaze at a river, or a
cloud, or a puddle of rain, McKibben argued compellingly, we are
now observing something that is, at least in part, a product of
human culture. Even weather and climate, he claimed, were being
shaped by the environmental consequences of a global, fossil-
fuel–consuming economic system. That was more than 20 years ago,
and although the disconcerti