Grave New World article

Grave New World
George Scialabba
October 01, 2003



Until lately I thought the most troubling book I had ever read was The End of Nature, Bill McKibben’s searching meditation on humankind’s definitive eclipse of our nonhuman context. That book was not primarily a catalogue of likely environmental disasters, imminent or eventual, though there was more than enough such worrisome news. What mainly preoccupied McKibben was that we have, without forethought, passed a momentous limit. By the end of the 20th century the scale of human activity had grown so rapidly and enormously that the nonhuman world now exists on our sufferance—not this or that niche, but the character of the whole.

The resulting loss, McKibben suggested, cannot be gauged. In the last two centuries we destroyed many of the wonders of the world: the Colorado River and its sublime canyons (very nearly including the Grand Canyon), the California redwoods, the tallgrass prairie, the bison herds, the grizzlies. Each disappearance has occasioned much anguish among those who loved such places and creatures, at least in imagination. But in each case the idea of nature survived: our confidence, however feckless, that we might disfigure the planet here or there but could never overwhelm it; that we might misuse it, or even use up this or that aspect of it, but that as a whole it would endure, essentially as it always had—mute, unmasterable, sovereign in its indifference to us.

No longer. The increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the associated long-term climate changes, are capable of altering the distribution of life forms on earth so profoundly that the distinction between natural and artificial is imperiled. If “natural” means what happens without human intervention, outside human control, then the natural world has in effect disappeared. Even if global industrial activity is henceforth curtailed, which is hardly likely, we have already gone too far. We may yet avoid ruining the world, but we have already shrunken it drastically, with unpredictable—and probably not very healthy—effects on our collective psyche.

McKibben’s next book, Hope, Human and Wild, reported on some comparatively sane ways of living within this shrunken world. It described the resourceful city administration of Curitiba, Brazil, with its ingenious low-tech solutions to flood control, garbage collection, and public transportation; the Indian district of Kerala, comparable to the United States in literacy and life expectancy with only 1/70th the per capita income; and, surprisingly, the northeastern United States, where forests and wildlife have made an unexpected recovery in recent decades and communities have begun to defend themselves against industrial predation. Whether enough people will decide soon enough, as McKibben urged his readers, “to slow down, to reduce expectations, to undevelop” is highly uncertain. Still, the book left one with a chastened, tentative hopefulness about nature’s prospects.

I figured this would go over like a fart in a spacesuit.. lol

Peee yewwwww!!!

Sorry Frigg.  It's just almost too depressing for me to even think about.  As I said in another thread elsewhere about the BLM wanting to get rid of the last few herds of wild horses:  Nothing's sacred.