Before we all head off into our gas-powered, coal-fired lives this week, I invite you to take the pledge: You will not let the summer go by without reading Bill McKibben’s Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. It’s not exactly beach reading, unless your beach is on the Gulf of Mexico. And the way I see it, that is now everybody’s beach, everybody’s wetlands, everybody’s ruin. We all have a hand in that broken cookie jar.
Bill McKibben would have us know a few simple things:
1. Climate change isn’t some hypothetical future event. It’s here. Now. And it’s only going to get worse.
2. Civilization as we’ve known it—the civilization made possible by a stable, abundant and richly diverse planet—is screwed. Because that planet no longer exists. It’s over.
3. Modernity has been made possible by cheap fossil fuels—and those days are gone.
For doubters, there’s data—lots of it. And the numbers add up to this: the planet that human culture has known for 10,000 years has been changed so dramatically by human activity, McKibben has rechristened it “eaarth,” with an extra ‘a’. After you read the first half of the book, you might wonder why he didn’t just call it Planet Doom. (more…)
Tracy Seeley's Blog 