Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth

Bill McKibben takes an original view of some environmental issues and some solutions. I was especially pleased to read about Curitiba in Brazil and the Kerala in India. This town in Brazil and state in India show that we humans can live full happy lives on our planet while using less resources. I was also pleased to read about reforestation in New England. This short hopeful book is definitely worth reading.

In it, there are stories about how entire communities have been positively transformed by the action of a few determined individuals. This book will have you contemplating how you can affect change in your own community, and will give you the courage to enact it.

This book is an exploration into what's right and what's wrong with the planet and our relationship with it. It was written as a sequel to an earlier book by McKibben, "The End of Nature." In this book, McKibben starts by identifying some areas where there is hope for improvement in the environment in the future. The book is arranged in four parts. In the first part, McKibben considers examples of environmental recovery in his own region. He then turns to two parts of the world with very different local solutions to global problems. The first of these is Curataiba, Brazil, a city made famously livable by some very forward-thinking city planners. He then turns to Kerala, India, noting that a relatively high quality of life can be achieved with extremely limited resources, provided one addresses the key structural problems of society first. In the last section of the book, he reflects on his observations from the three regions. McKibben hardly needed to look any further than his own backyard for proof that the environment can indeed bounce back to some extent from extreme abuse. His backyard in the Adirondacks is now full of trees, a condition that is now common throughout the Eastern United States. Much more common, in fact, than it was just fifty years ago. A little over a hundred years ago, most landscapes in the Northeast were treeless. The trees had been cut down to clear fields, to use for ship building and house construction, and most notably, to use for fuel. With the invention of a plow that could at last turn the thick prairie soil, many of the New England farmers pushed westward, glad to leave their cold, stony fields to grow up into forest again. But changes in fuel usage played an even larger role in the recovery of the trees. A hundred years ago, we got 90% of our energy from wood, necessitating the cutting down of millions of acres of forest per year just to keep the economy going. With the switch to petroleum-based fuels, we now rely on wood for just 10% of our energy, and as a result, the forests in the East are now thicker than they have been for over four hundred years. In tandem with the return of the trees, the wildlife are also coming back, and wild turkeys and bear sightings are now more common in this region than they have ever been since the arrival of Europeans on the continent. As petroleum fuels become more difficult and expensive to come by, we can only hope that we will stumble on a new fuel to replace oil, just as oil replaced wood. McKibben's discussion of Curataiba is quite stimulating. He describes how ingenious local leaders made the city into a model of a livable, workable metropolis. They did this not by copying technology of developed countries, but by creating original solutions based on locally available materials and culture. Kerala also was faced with seemingly insurmountable problems of poverty, race, and class. Individual leaders in Kerala were successful in getting the community to

In a time when many people finally accept the fact of global warming and of continuing human assault on the environment, Bill McKibben has launched this wonderfully written, inspiring, and informative book, another in his continuing series of important essays on the complex relationship between humankind and the planet we inhabit. McKibben, a former writer for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, transplanted himself and his small family in the Adirondack region of upstate New York in the late 1980s, from whence he has come once more to deliver a healthy dollop of insight, whimsy, and wisdom concerning the way we continue to walk not so lightly on the earth. Like most environmentalists, McKibben is deeply concerned about the continuing onslaught on the skin of the planet, and about our continuing disregard for the welfare of everything within the natural environment we most depend upon to have a continuing quality of life. Yet he is also propelled by aspects of his own experience with the ecology of his local area to set off on what he terms to be an exploration of hope, in the sense that he was searching for examples of recovery and progress in the natural landscape. One wonderful example he uses is that of the recovery of the amount of land reforested since the signal journey of one Timothy White, who in traveling in the early 1800s found very little land not cut and turned to the plow. Yet some two hundred years later, much of the Northeast forest is once again covering the landscape, and all of this in spite of the vastly increased population over the landmass in question. Of course, as McKibben admits, must of the reforesting took place based on the gradual abandonment of the lands of the Northeast in the so-called western migration as we fulfilled our "Manifest Destiny", and this migration also spelled further deforestation efforts in those area under active migration. Once again, part of the genius of the natural environmental processes can be viewed in such a way, requiring not so much in the way of human intervention as in a kind of purposeful benign neglect (my own hackneyed term, not McKibben's). Left alone long enough, natural processes are underway that are restoring the Northeast forests to their primordial glory. And, like McKibben, I wonder at the good fortune some of us have to live in relatively sparsely developed and populated areas, where we can enjoy nature on amore personal level, where deer and bear and moose and all sorts of birds are free to live and roam. I sit in wonder with my friends the Labradors and watch, enraptured as the geese soar noisily above me this time every year.....Moreover, one must share his frustration and sadness at the prospect of such massive forces denuding and despoiling the ecosystems even as we read and write. While he offers some reasons for hope, the truth may be that things will have to become much worse for human beings to begin to act more responsibly in following his advice to find many more w

This book is essential reading for environmentalists.