Recommended Reading: Eaarth by Bill McKibben

Time to take a little reprieve from my usual writings here and talk about somebody else’s writings. I recently finished the book (in audiobook form) Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, and felt somewhat compelled to recommend it to people who might care what I think about things.

A little background before digging into Eaarth; Bill McKibben was the first person to write a book about global warming for a general audience in 1989, that book was The End of Nature. Since that time McKibben has become one of the most famous environmental journalists in the world. 20 years ago, he though that simply presenting the argument for anthropogenic global warming would stir people into action. Now he writes because we did not take action and there are, and will be consequences for that lack of action.

The entire premise for Earth is stated in the title: Making a Living on a Tough New Planet. This new planet, McKibben argues, is the Earth we live on, but due to the changes on that planet, it is not the Earth he grew up on. The Earth as it exists now is different, so to make that point, this new Earth has a different name: Eaarth. Very similar, but just slightly different, much like the new planet we live on.

There are quite a few things I really liked about the book, but also a few things I wasn’t so hot on. What I don’t really like, and I feel like I should put this right up front as it could potentially damage your consumption of this book, is the pacing. The first half of the book is loaded to the brim with depressing statistics, stories and overwhelming sense of failure. It’s not until the second half of the book that we get to the more uplifting ideas and see the silver lining in it all.

I actually think that a person not prepared for this could become overwhelmed and just become apathetic to the whole issue, like so many are, and if you stop reading/listening there, you will lose the whole thing.

I feel as if McKibben should’ve sprinkled the good and bad together throughout, rather than beat you over the head with it and then nurse your concussion, but it really does make the second half of the book quite a pay off in it’s current form.

Things I like very much are the wide breadth of issues discussed, from climate change, sustainability and the politics of the issues to the lesser talked about points of the effects on the developing world, agriculture and the spread of disease. His ideas for change are the best part of the book, in my opinion. Decentralization of services, removal of subsidies within industrial agriculture and fossil fuel markets, and reliance on local community and self sustainability. Anyone who wants to up the punx can get behind it.

His ideas for change aren’t hard proposals and things that we will actually need to combat what is to come, and he never says they are, but they are seeds to be planted in public consciousness . They are instead abstract ideas that show us how we might combat the hardships of our future and small cases of it in effect now.

It’s very clear to anyone that reads this I believe that McKibben is writing with the very worst in mind most of the time (though he states otherwise occasionally), but in the scenario’s in his book, I think it is neccesary given that he points out how wildley conservative the scientific estimates of the effects of global warming have been historically and how they’ve been very wrong.

Since I did experience this book via audioform, I don’t have a list of his sources to check out. Very few things I heard sounded out of bounds with my understanding of the science, however. I will probably buy a hard copy sooner or later to reread, and check out some of the sources, because there are some very interesting facts and data referenced that I was unaware of before (would like to say these here, but my mental bookmarks have failed me and it’s hard to skim an audio book unfortunately).

If you want to know more about this book and Bill McKibben, I suggest listening to the two part interview Scientific American did with him for their podcast.

I highly reocmmend checking it out.

Amazon
Audible