© Salon
According to Bill McKibben, the respected environmentalist and author of the pioneering
End of Nature, the planet Earth, as we know it, is already dead.
Over a million square miles of the Arctic ice cap have melted, the oceans have risen and warmed, and the tropics have expanded 2 degrees north and south. Global warming has caused such pervasive and irreversible changes, he argues, that we now live on a new planet with a new set of environmental and climatic realities - and, as such, it deserves a new name: Goodbye, Earth. Hello, "Eaarth."
McKibben's hair-raising new book,
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, is a scrupulous and impassioned account of the severely compromised globe on which we now live. He lays out the myriad ways in which climate change has remade our world, but he also goes much further, chronicling its current and future human toll. He explains how droughts in Australia helped precipitate the 2008 food crisis and put 40 million people at risk of hunger, and how the rapidly melting glaciers of the Andes and Himalayas may soon threaten the water supply of billions.
Our only hope of survival, McKibben suggests, is a reversion to small-scale, local ways of life. "We simply can't live on the new earth as if it were the old earth," he writes. "We've foreclosed that option."
Comment: Earth is going through a natural cycle, moving rapidly toward the next Ice Age. Sure, it will wipe out most of humanity - maybe all - but considering the last 7K years, maybe that's not a bad thing?