Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben, Times Books, 2010, 210 pages.
Twenty years ago, Bill McKibben declared in The End of Nature, that nature had been forever altered by human acts. He was right. He foretold of a dangerous tide of change that was likely to follow. Although his book was well-received, sold a lot of copies, and remains a popular environmental standard, McKibben admits: it did no good. fossil fuels burned; forests obliterated; oceans over fished; stuff manufactured to replace last year’s model, CO2 levels rose, climate changed.
McKibben now tells us our old Earth has morphed. We have a new planet, a new version: eaarth, formed within a “crescendo of cascading consequences.” Over a billion people are hungry or at risk of hunger (more than 1 in 6). Massive swarms of jellyfish bloom in warmer acidic oceans devouring native species. Extensive blobs of E. coli filled mucus, up to two-hundred kilometers long, float on the warmed seas, aggregate on piles of garbage or open ocean, and suffocate sea life by clogging their gills. Droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, insect swarms, and pathogenic viruses and bacteria all on the increase. Species extinctions mount on daily basis. The diatribe of devastation is lengthy. However elegant his prose, this is uncomfortable to face, so many don’t.
Climate change skeptics are unlikely to pick up this book. If you read his book –or even this review—you are under recruitment. We’ve changed our light bulbs, ridden our bikes, and limited our beef intake. We now need system changes, better thinking. The theme “bigger is not better” seems antithetical to capitalistic thought, but McKibben makes it seem plausible.
McKibben joins the voices calling for smarter high and low tech solutions and a laying down of our obsession with growth. Time to retool. Time for each community to find solutions best for their circumstances, while supported and integrated into the small and big governmental plans. McKibben calls us to re-imagine our life on this new eaarth. He asks us to halt our vision of an ever-expanding economy, to support small farms, which as it turns out have higher yields and use less fossil fuel even before we take the food transport cost into effect, to retool our economies, to end our addiction to the fossil fuels that destroyed the Earth we knew, and to use the abundant renewable energy sources at hand.
Eaarth calls for a new vision. Citizen activists and voters must drive change, because mega corporations entangled in fossil fuel business will continue to use their dollars and power to obstruct the required retooling. Eaarth has given us factual ammunition, insight, and hope. Eaarth is a recruitment brochure. Find current action plans and get started at his site: www.350.org. McKibben has not just thrown his hands in the air, he’s thrown them out to us.
350--"the most important number in the world"
Amy Lou Jenkins is the author of .jpg)
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"If you combined the lyricism of Annie Dillard, the vision of Aldo Leopold, and the gentle but tough-minded optimism of Frank McCourt, you might come close to Amy Lou Jenkins...I, for one, would follow her anywhere."—Tom Bissell author of The Father of All Things
"Jenkins' polished literary style makes it, sentence by sentence, a joy to read." - Phillip Lopate, author of Waterfront 
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