From the Archives: On Bill McKibben and The End of Nature

            Environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben is on a speaking tour, and I’m sorry I’ll miss him when he stops in Kansas City, at UMKC, on Oct. 6. (He’s also in Columbia, MO, today, Oct. 4.) McKibben has been a consistent leader in the literature of alarm. I dug out my piece on his landmark book The End of Nature and was a little surprised to realize how current his arguments remain nearly 30 years later. You can recognize the awareness of the climate change debate that continues today, though without the ugly divisiveness we seem to be stuck with. The language is a little outdated (“global warming”) and McKibben can sometimes be precious (as perhaps was I) and predictably pessimistic to the extreme. But I thought it would be interesting to revisit the state of environmental consciousness-raising from the 1980s. This review of The End of Nature first appeared in The Kansas City Star on Oct. 15, 1989.

The end of nature that Bill McKibben addresses in his vitally important and terribly depressing new book is not so much the end of the world, but the end of the human idea of nature as being something bigger than we are – eternal, separate, permanent and immutable.

            That perception has come to an end, the end of nature has arrived, McKibben argues in a startling and deeply moving essay, because we have proved as a species that we have the God-like power to alter the Earth on a global scale.

            Of course, being both important and depressing will argue against its being widely read, but The End of Nature may be the one essential book published this year.

            Even as brooding as it is, the book, as an urgent call to action and a manifesto for humility, should wind up standing shoulder to shoulder with such mind-altering predecessors in natural history and philosophy as Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

            McKibben writes for The New Yoerker, where a long excerpt of the book appeared last month. He is not a scientist, but he makes the science and the scientific uncertainty that underpin his thesis meaningful and accessible.

            We have changed the planet – and there’s no turning back, he will make you believe – in our greed and gluttony for more and better. Our utter reliance on fossil fuels and other human endeavors have caused a buildup of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere that is inexorably warming the planet. It has done so in a mere 100 years, an iota on the scale of biological or even human time.

            Even if we completely change our habits now, McKibben writes – and what is the likelihood of that? – enough damage has been done and will become evident in the decades to come.

            Scientists may, and do vigorously debate whether global warming actually has begun but few doubt the soundness of the theory or the possibility of a grim chain reaction of corollary events that may change the way much of the Earth’s population lives – as sea levels rise, as temperatures stay high, as hurricanes become more forceful. One theory has Dallas experiencing half the year at 90 degrees or higher.

            And then, let’s talk about the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere. Or acid rain. Or other forms of global-scale pollution.

            “In our minds,” McKibben writes, “nature suffers from a terrible case of acne, or even skin cancer – but our faith in its essential strength remains, for the damage always seems local. But now the basis of that faith is lost. The idea of nature will not survive the new global pollution … By changing the weather, we make every spot on Earth man-made and artificial.”

            We can never again see nature as it was, he writes; we are doomed to accept the fact that all of it has our stamp, that nature, in the form of climate and weather and all the biological interactions dependent upon them, does not act independent of us anymore. Even if it cannot be proved that the drought of 1988 was a manifestation of global warming, it also cannot be proved that it wasn’t, and just the thought that we may have brought it about is unsettling. Was that rain? The question will go. Or was it something we did?

            McKibben considers the various cures for global warming – nuclear power, planting trees, an umbrella in space – and finds each of them wanting or bringing along their own problems. Plant trees, the environmental president tells us; trouble is, to absorb an adequate level of carbond dioxide we would need to plant an area the size of Europe and by shifting from open field to tree cover we would change the albedo, or the light-reflecting characteristic of the surface, and very likely increase the level of heat absorption.

            Such riddles and “feedback loops” face us at every turn, it seems.

            McKibben attacks the problems not only from a scientific perspective, but also culturally, philosophically, geopolitically and even theologically: Those who look for God in nature, he suggests, now can find only themselves.

            We take nature for granted, but our whole relationship with it has changed.

            “One reason we pay so little close attention the separate natural world around us,” he writes, “is that it has always been there and we presumed it always would. As it disappears, its primal importance will be clearer – in the same way that some people think they have put their parents our of their lives and learn differently only when the day comes to bury them.”

            If The End of Nature is relentlessly pessimistic, so be it. McKibben offeres a moral antidote to the feel-good, New Age notion of macromanaging the planet, of the technological panaceas – for and profit for all! – made possible in the coming era of genetic engineering.

            One (not I) might criticize McKibben for a “tree-hugging,” sentimental attachment to wildness and the mystery of nature – get with the program, Bill! – but one can’t help sharing his profound sense of loss.

            There is a danger that a reader may come away from The End of Nature feeling the same kind of existential despair experienced by the young Woody Allen character in “Annie Hall,” the one who tells the psychiatrist he has stopped eating because he just learned that the universe was expanding. What’s the point of going on? the boy concludes. Those susceptible to melancholic reflection are forewarned.

            But there is, perhaps a far greater danger in not facing up to the scenario McKibben has devised, to the questions about ourselves he has raised, and in the complacency we so easily embrace. It is time now to pay attention and to do something. The End of Nature is a kick in the head. And it comes none too soon. Read it and weep.

"Hold the Ground": An Evening With Terry Tempest Williams

     It has been way too long since I’ve given myself the gift of a quality road trip out West. Yellowstone. Colorado. New Mexico. Big Bend. Those wide open, mysterious and treasured landscapes have framed indelible encounters with earth and sky over the last four decades or so.

     Fourteen years ago, I led an odd post-modern trek along the Lewis and Clark Trail. After a rough-water encounter in the middle of the Missouri River in Montana, I lived to tell about it in a newspaper series. That two-week journey went from Missouri to the Oregon coast and back. On the trip home, I convinced my traveling companions to go along on a brief detour so I could take a look at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah. For me it was a pilgrimage, paying a debt I owed. Terry Tempest Williams first introduced me to Bear River by way of the written word. The refuge plays a prominent role in her deeply moving and provocative memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). In the book, Terry wove together three threads – an intimate account of her mother’s death by cancer; the troubling parallel story of the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake and the precarious fate of the Bear River refuge and the millions of birds that rely on its place along their seasonal flyways; and, third, the disturbing theme that questioned how American nuclear bomb tests in the desert in the 1950s very likely affected the health and lives of downwinders, especially of women in her devoutly Mormon extended family. There’s the chilling moment when she learns that one of those enormous flashes went off as her father drove in the desert and her mother sat in the passenger seat pregnant with the future writer and activist.

     I heard Terry read that aching essay, fresh out of the typewriter, in 1989 at a writer’s workshopin Ranchos de Taos, N.M. Later, I reviewed her book, and followed her travels and her work over the next quarter of a century. Whenever my own travels take me to wilderness, to natural landscapes, or even when I’m only a spectator flying over those brown and rolling deserts of the west, I always feel I am carrying Terry’s spirit of openness, awe, and love for the wild. A sense of native identity and energy also imbues her regard for those lands, as well it should.

     In recent years I’m mostly the armchair schlub who reads about wilderness more than he enters it. From time to time I make a winter excursion into the desert of New Mexico, to the Jemez Pueblo, where the annual Three King’s feast day Buffalo Dance undulates for hours in a ritual of patterned motion and spirit sounds. The dance and its continual drumming amount to an expression of identity as authentically American as anything one could think of. (See my column of football, healing and the Buffalo Dance.)

     Well, the point of all this is that Terry came to Kansas City last week for a library talk about the making of her most recent book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. Originally imagined as a “love letter” to our wild lands on the 100th anniversary (in 2016) of the National Park Service, the project became far more challenging, she confessed. At first it seemed somewhat beyond her grasp. She had to figure out which of the 59 parks to write about and then how to do it. In the end, Terry being Terry, the book she turned in was far more political than her editors had expected. As she hikes the contours of, say, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota or Acadia in Maine, she is never far away from vital and threatening issues such as fracking, land use, and encroaching development. She confronts controversy head on, including a scandal a few years ago over construction and desecration at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa, which prompted a period of distrust among numerous tribes.

     Also that night at the Woodneath Library Center she expressed the deep disappointment brought about by the fossil-fuel priorities of the current administration. Currently under way is a plan to erase or severely diminish the Bears Ears National Monument in her native Utah. The 1.3-million-acre expanse had gained federal protection in the last months of the Obama administration, and, like almost everything passed by the 44th president, it swiftly became a candidate for repeal. Terry had been a vocal advocate for the Bears Ears designation, siding with the five Indian tribes – Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute and Ute Indian – who sought to forestall looming energy production on what they consider to be sacred space.  In the long debate over Bears Ears, Terry said, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the crusty Republican, once declared the indigenous people did not know what they were talking about. “That’s not patronizing,” she told the 100 or so people in the audience. “It’s racism.”

     She also brought us up to date on the oddly ironic legal case the federal government brought against her and her husband, because they had the audacity to purchase two oil and gas leases covering about 1,000 acres in Utah without any intention of drilling. The Bureau of Land Management rejected the purchase, and their appeal is pending.

     Terry mission is to be a storyteller, and she closed the evening with two compelling anecdotes. One, which she recounts in the book, involved a harrowing afternoon at Glacier National Park when three forest fires converged and blew past the inn where she and three dozen others huddled inside. The other was a sight she witnessed with her husband, Brooke, at Yellowstone. Coyotes were feeding on a bison carcass in the near distance. A white wolf emerged from the trees and took control of the blood-soaked remains. Soon, after the wolf left, a procession of bison lumbered into view and encircled the fallen creature in what felt like a miraculous ritual of animal spirit. “We are not,” she said, “the only species that loves and grieves.” To Terry Tempest Williams, the large-hearted naturalist, evocative writer and fiercely active defender of nature, the spirits were sending a message: “Hold the ground. Hold the ground. Hold the ground.”