Featured Book:
EAARTH
Making A Life On A Tough New Planet
Dear Reader,
Hello there. First things first, yes, it’s a weird title. Why “Eaarth,” with two A’s? Because the book shows something brand new: that we’ve already managed to change the planet in such fundamental ways that it’s not really the planet we thought we knew. It’s still like earth, except:
- Everything frozen has melted or is melting: the ice caps, the high-altitude glaciers.
- The tropics have expanded two degrees north and south, pushing drought ahead of them.
- Even the chemistry of seawater is steadily becoming more acid, as the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
I’ve been fighting hard to stop climate change since I published the first book on the topic, The End of Nature, in 1989. In the past two years I’ve led the largest global grass roots campaign to force real action. This work is hugely necessary—without it climate change will reach levels of complete chaos. But already we’ve passed the point where we can avoid serious change, and with it the need for a real re-thinking of how we’re going to live on this planet.
I make the case that we’re going to have to figure out how to stop focusing our economies on growth, and start thinking about survival. That means embracing local, smaller-scale ways of living, like it or not. Happily, there’s much to like. Think about food: Americans this past year embraced gardening: seed sales more than doubled. Think about energy: Instead of relying on a few centralized power plants, we’re quickly heading for a nation of solar panels and small windmills, of neighbors generating power for their neighbors.
We’ve built a new Eaarth. It’s not as nice as the old one; it’s the greatest mistake humans have ever made, one that we will pay for literally forever. We live on a new planet. But we have to live on it. So we better start understanding what the hell is going on.
Bill McKibben
