The End of Nature by Bill McKibben
1990; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1990.0048
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoReviews 263 The fifties setting, so popular today with many writers and movie makers, provides another commentary on that time—a look into how a subjected cul ture lives through one of the most prosperous eras of Anglo-American history. Perhaps Ponce is making the point that humor, however dark, is necessary for survival, and, although they may be uneducated and unsophisticated, all of her characters are survivors. RITA BURLESON MELENDEZ El Paso Community College The End of Nature. By Bill McKibben. (New York: Random House, 1989. 226 pages, $19.95.) This somberly titled book, whose black jacket features an artist’s concep tion of an overheated earth, isbeing widely talked about as the ’90s’equivalent of Silent Spring. There is, I think, substantial validity in the linkage. The thesis is that industrial man, mainly by adding enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to the air, has “substantially altered the earth’s atmosphere” (italics in original). The alteration, which continues and may be accelerating, will have major effects on worldwide climatic regimes. By our own folly, greed, unconsciousness, and so forth, we have banished ourselves, perhaps forever, from a world where at least the broad outlines of the weather, and the produc tivity of the ecosystems dependent on it, were generally predictable, year to year. We are, McKibben argues, in for tough times. The corollary to this thesis is where the book’stitle comes in. Bybecoming the manager of the atmosphere, affecting now the whole earth through such phenomena as acid rain, humanity has effectively canceled its own conception of nature as wild. The rain that falls isnow to some significant degree our rain. Not only isthe world no longer reliable in the old way, it isin some ofour minds no longer even “other.” Images of nature as refuge, mother, sacred ground, and the like will soon become sentimental archaisms. If McKibben is right on this point, we indeed stand at a major divide. It is a difficult point to prove. After all (to use a comparison familiar to WAL readers), the frontier has been officially closed for a century, but the frontier mentality blithely continues and in fact still sets the popular western images. We may go on resolutely believing in the wildness of nature, down to the last, Venusian days. But this book’s weighty and provocative proposition, passionately argued, demands our best attention right now. The situation it speaks to is inarguably urgent and consequential. THOMAS J. LYON Utah State University ...
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