Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

If you want to debate whether global warming is real, or, if it's real, whether it's a natural phenomenon or something we did, or if "drill, baby, drill" can bring cheap energy back to America or whether depleting the earth's resources is a good thing because it brings on the End Times --- there are many places on the Internet you can go to have those conversations. Bill McKibben's book is not one of those places. Just the spelling of the title of "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet" --- the most important book you can read this year, and yes, I know, it's only April --- signals that we are, in his view, beyond all those conversations. Bill McKibben is the dean of environmental writers, and there's a good reason for that --- in The End of Nature, published in 1989, he was the first to use the term "global warming." A few years ago, in Deep Economy, he was among the first to write that an economy built on growth was not sustainable and that we needed to scale down and strengthen our ties to our local communities. Not happy messages, but we pay attention because he is a serious thinker, a stellar reporter and a writer who can make even statistics interesting. A great communicator takes complexity and makes it clear for the layman. Like this: Global warming has reached a stage that we no longer are living on the same planet we grew up on. Let McKibben explain: Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It's our reality. We've changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways. And these changes are far, far more evident in the toughest parts of the globe, where climate change is already wrecking thousands of lives daily. In July 2009, Oxfam released an epic report, "Suffering the Science," which concluded that even if we now adapted "the smartest possible curbs" on carbon emissions, "the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world's poorest." In the first part of this book, McKibben explains how we got here --- that is, how we blew past an atmosphere with less than 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, and what happens now that we're at 390, and what will happen if we don't get back to 350, and fast. And how unlucky it is for us that we're starting to run short of fossil fuel ("Simply running in place would mean finding four new Saudi Arabias by 2030") just as we've dangerously destabilized the planet. The pols talk about making the planet "safer for our grandchildren." As soon as they talk generations down the line, you can stop listening to them, McKibben says. They don't get it. We don't have that kind of time. We've got to wean ourselves from our obsession with growth, and pronto: "If don't stop pouring more carbon into the atmosphere, the temperature will simply keep rising, right past the point where any kind of adaptation will prove impossible." This isn't going to happen. Wall Street lives on the Go

What would it be like to live on another planet? Like the proverbial frogs sitting in a pot of water slowly coming to a boil, we'll all eventually find out whether we want to or not. Bill McKibben maintains that we NOW live on a very different planet, a planet that's rapidly becoming less and less like the one humans have inhabited for many thousands of years. And it's too late to turn our space ship around and go back "home." No, we have to wake up and start learning how to live on the planet as it is--not the one we still would like to imagine that we live on. The first part of this book is bleak, and it needs to be. Too many of us are in complete denial about the condition of our planet and the mass extinctions now in process. So, who cares about how many species are going extinct? Anyone who understands that no man is an island. And that cold/wet weather we've had in 2010 that proves "there is no such thing as global warming"? That weather will only get more unpredictable and violent as time goes by--and, yes, it's due to global warming. James Hanson and so many other scientists were right, except for the fact that they underestimated how quickly climate change would occur. It's not a matter of what you believe: Nobody is going to be able to sleep through the earth changes--and isolationism, a cache of arms, and a lot of hateful rhetoric is not going to feed anyone's family or keep them secure. Skills are the new gold, and we need to return to the days when neighbors helped neighbors. We need to press our technologies into service to help us survive, but we also need to return to a Depression-era sense of frugality and saving for rainy days. There will likely be many more "rainy days" in the future than there were in the past. In the last half of the book, McKibben presents some projects that are already underway to help us and our progeny survive on this strange new world that he renames "Eaarth" because our old Earth is already dead. Each and every one of us needs to be thinking about how we can ameliorate harsher conditions, and we need to pick the brains of the old folks before they are gone so we don't have to completely reinvent a bunch of new wheels. Me, I will be running mycelium, making biochar, permaculturing, keeping chickens, and growing/preserving a lot of our own food. I will be a denizen of the instructables web site and the dumpsters, and I will figure out as many ways as I can to work with Nature and not against her. I will try to help those who are near me who are suffering, and I will cultivate friends who are willing to help others as well. What will you do? A good start would be to read this book, especially if you think climate change is a hoax intended to deny you of your freedoms. I hope all who are blind will begin to see. Life is going to be hard enough with our eyes wide open.

The first two chapters of this book provide a good overview of the evidence for, and the consequences of, global warming. These consequences do not get as much attention as they should, and if anything, will likely be more severe than described. I believe that McKibben's assertion that the changes are clearly apparent now, not an expection of the future, is true. The recent massive snow fall in Washington DC is one of the expectations of global warming: warmer air hold more water; more water means more snow dumped at lower lattitudes as weather fronts move north. The unusual spelling, eaarth, used as the title is intended to convey the idea that the Earth has alrady changed, and is not the Earth as we generally think of her. The last two chapters of the book are a guide to changing the bad habits that have lead us to this eaarth. I was very pleased by the breadth of this coverage. But I do not think that there is as yet sufficient anxiety among the general public, and perhaps more importantly, among politicians, about climate change to effect these changes in a timely manner. Climate change denial seems to be a major plank in the platforms of several political movements. Many elected officials looked out over a Washington DC brought to a total stand still by snow, and still managed find this to be evidence for a normal winter. But political climate change is necesary to survive the changing global climate. Some serious cultural changes have to be made to reduce/eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from major sources and these will require a type of politics which is impossible today. Two of these are Portland cement manufacturing and air travel. The former will require either development of new building materials with a small manufacturing carbon footprint (unlikely), or complete sequestration of CO2 emissions, a costly change that will undoubtedly require federal incentives at taxpayer expense. Air travel will have to be curtailed; CO2 emissions from aircraft engines cannot be captured at all. I do not think that our current elected officials are up to it. This is an important book. Every policy maker at all levels of government should get a copy, although the denial folks will certainly not read it. I wish it was more emphatic about the evidence at hand, and the seriousness of the problems. Skeptical readers might also want to visit the CDC website for an overview of the public health consequences of climate change, many of which are also currently in evidence. The title of the book, eaarth, is clever, but should have been the Richerd Zeebe's quotation in chapter 1, "It's pretty outrageous what we've done."

Bill McKibben's Eaarth is a refreshing read. I'll admit, when I first started Eaarth, I had concerns that it would devolve into a depressing diatribe where, after reading, I would feel depressed and powerless about the state of the planet. Not so. Eaarth is an excellent and empowering read. McKibben outlines where the planet is--climate-wise--currently. He tells it like it is, no judging or haranguing. The second half of the book is empowering. McKibben offers small scale, local solutions to the problems he sees. He is not waiting for the rest of the planet, or even the rest of the country to hop aboard his bandwagon. His solutions are achievable in the smallest of communities. Eaarth is an inspiring and uplifting read--once you accept his premise that the planet has irrevocably changed for the worse.

The front cover of Bill McKibbean's "Eaarth" contains a quote by Barbara Kingsolver urging the reader to drop everything and read the book straight through. What Kingsolver doesn't mention is that once you begin reading the book it'll be impossible to stop. McKibben describes a place so strikingly different from the planet Earth we have always known, that it has to be renamed to "Eaarth." McKibben's writing is easy to read and his ideas are clear, but his thesis is overwhelming to any reader: "The earth that we knew--the only earth that we ever knew--is gone." (pg 25) At times, reading the book is similar to the experience of watching a carwreck - it's heart-wrenching but you can't force yourself to look away. A lot of readers will probably dismiss Eaarth based on its "environmentalist agenda" - they'll say that McKibben is simply another tree-hugger attempting to instill fear about the world of the future, or to borrow McKiben's explanation as to why we haven't stopped climate change thus far - "the world of our grandchildren." But if this is true, then we definitely need more people like the author of Earth, as it doesn't seem that anyone is listening - currently, "44 percent Americans believe that global warming comes from 'long-term planetary trends' and not the pumps at the Exxon station." (pg 54) McKibben is probably one of the very few to steer us into the the direction of thinking that we can't restore the old Planet Earth. Thinking that driving hybrid cars and taking shorter showers will restore the ice caps in the Arctic is unrealistic. We need a major overhaul of our infrastructure and our logic to even adapt on this New Earth we created. It's no longer enough to admit that global warming is real and to want to adjust a few things in our daily lives - we must realize that our daily lives are gone in the way we've known them. The author's suggestions of how to adapt to living on this new and changed Earth are hopeful and rely on getting rid of industries, on going back to a more simplistic lifestyle of individual farming, moving the entire infrastructure closer to home, and observing as much conservation as possible. "Eaarth" is a book that should serve as a wake up call, but not in the same way that Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" (book and/or movie) did. By being more Earth-shattering (pun intended), McKibben's book is also more realistic and contains more statistics and McKibben quotes more articles to back up his thesis. However, the book's revolutionary words might also be alienating and can be viewed as a source of despair. In his introduction, McKibben cautions us against this being the case by saying that "[m]aturity is not the opposite of hope; it's what makes hope possible." (pg xiv) It is this reviewer's sincere hope that McKibben's book is taken seriously and interpreted as a call to action rather than as a description of challenging events that can no longer be stopped or altered.