The End of Nature

His 1989 book The End of Nature, it's often compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and how big of an effect it had on this issue.

So this is from your book in a Los Angeles Times review of The End of Nature the Kibben's influential book of 25 years ago predicting catastrophic climate change David M. Graber research biologist for the National Park Service wrote this summary of McKibben's message McKibben is a biosentrist and so am I we are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free flowing river or ecosystem to mankind they have intrinsic value more value to me than another human being that's a very interesting thing to say or a billion of them which is also a very interesting thing to say human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet are no social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature but that isn't true somewhere along the line at about a billion years ago maybe half that we quit the contract and became a cancer we had become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth it is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil fuel consumption and the third world its suicidal consumption of landscape until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along

The tone of that book was less fear than sadness because the big changes weren't yet breaking over our heads the way they are now.

Then it was mostly the anticipation 20 years ago of what it would feel like to live in a world that meant something different not just a world that didn't operate effectively or easily anymore but one that spiritually, psychologically, philosophically meant something different and something less than the one that I'd been born into.

It came out 20 years ago this fall that's right.

In these years since you wrote *The End of Nature* in '89 and now and this turns up in all your writing um you've become much less focused on individual uh life and life in action and on and much more on the value of community and this as the context for all the important changes we need to make.

Only in the disappearance of nature as we have known it he warned, May we finally realize how essential it has been to human civilization.

The tone of that book was less fear than sadness because the big changes weren't yet breaking over our heads the way they are now. Then it was mostly the anticipation 20 years ago of what it would feel like to live in a world that meant something different, not just a world that did not operate effectively or easily anymore. But one that spiritually psychologically philosophically meant something different and something less than the one that I'd been born into.

The tone of that book was less fear than sadness because the big changes weren't yet breaking over our heads the way they are now.

Then it was mostly the anticipation 20 years ago of what it would feel like to live in a world that meant something different not just a world that didn't operate effectively or easily anymore but one that spiritually, psychologically, philosophically meant something different and something less than the one that I'd been born into.

It came out 20 years ago this fall that's right.

In 1968 when I was a boy Apollo 8 sent back the first pictures of our planet that blue-white marble floating in space. Well those pictures are as out of date as my high school yearbook photo.

The planet doesn't look like that or behave like that anymore. There's more blue and less white, more cyclones swirling in the tropics. It's a different earth.

Only in the disappearance of nature as we have known it he warned, May we finally realize how essential it has been to human civilization.

From this vantage point, writing the end of nature seems to have crystallized a change in the entire direction of his life.

The tone of that book was less fear than sadness because the big changes weren't yet breaking over our heads the way they are now.

But one that spiritually psychologically philosophically meant something different and something less than the one that I'd been born into.