Predicting an End to the 'Sweet and Wild Garden'

ENDS are all the rage these days. Although scientists have been proclaiming for decades that the "end of physics" is in sight, the idea has never really caught in with the general public. Until now.

Those who take as gospel everything in print have this year been asked to believe that History is over. They have been told that Science may soon be gone as well. And New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis '48 has given them an apocalyptic view with a column on "The End of Forever."

The End of Nature

By Bill McKibben

Random House

$19.95, 226 pp.

Now comes Bill McKibben '82 with his contribution to the genre: The End of Nature, a series of philosophical musings on the global warning problem.

FADDISH as the title may sound, McKibben's book has a real point to make, and it makes it early on. Most of the public debate about the so-called greenhouse effect has focused on the details of global warming: Has it begun yet? What will its effects be?

Although McKibben does not skirt these questions, he argues along different lines. Regardless of the effects, he says, we have already changed the earth's atmosphere and continue to do so. What the result will be--good or ill-no one can tell. But the air today is undoubtedly different from 20 years ago, and will be different again 20 years from now.

And not just the air in Boston or the air in Los Angeles or Tanzania anywhere else. The greenhouse effect differs from all previous forms of pollution in that it is a global problem, he says. If we change the atmosphere, we change it everywhere. We are toying with a power nothing short of divine; we are extending the influence of human technology and human society over the entire globe.

And the end of nature is an inescapable consequence of the process, McKibben argues. Once humanity contaminates its last spot of virgin earth, nature, a world apart, will cease to exist. In its place will be something that may look like nature and sound like nature and smell like nature, but will not feel the same:

We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.

The End of Nature is at its best when McKibben explains the consequences of his "end of nature." Although not a scientist, he writes clearly and perceptively about several reasonably esoteric subjects--from genetic engineering to the recently-discovered hole in the Antarctic ozone layer. Although his explanations of global warming may seem doom-laden, they contain enough hard facts to give even the least environmentally aware person a serious jolt.

McKibben's arguments are most devastating when he tries to be frank and objective. He freely acknowledges that he does not know how the world will actually be different in the post-nature era, if at all. Such observations may seem equivocal, but they lend force to McKibben's arguments. No one knows what will happen, McKibben says; nothing is definite. When a world beyond humanity's reach no longer exists, there will be no security.

BUT ultimately, McKibben is a sentimentalist, not a scientist, for which The End of Nature suffers. The book's last chapter dissolves into a series of ruminations about what McKibben terms an "anthropocentric" society that values human life above all other forms. In order to forestall the end of nature, he says, humanity needs to begin thinking about the earth as a whole.

This argument sounds innocent enough at first, but as McKibben realizes, it has problems. Part of what McKibben loves in nature is his house and his garden in the Adirondacks. He acknowledges that in the interests of the entire globe he might have to give up such space and energy-wasting luxuries.

And I may be hopelessly mired in anthropocentrism, but I find McKibben's argument a bit elitist. The people who would suffer most by a general cutback in technology are those who don't have a house in the mountains. Citizens of underdeveloped countries and America's own poor depend on technolgy as a means of providing food, as a gateway to better lives. Who is to be sacrificed so that the wealthy of today and tommorow can enjoy gardens?

There are no easy answers to the global warming problem, and McKibben knows it. And the problems inherent in his final arguments are far outweighed by superb writing.

McKibben wrote for The New Yorker for several years after leaving Harvard, and it shows. The End of Nature cultivates the quietly lyrical style that is the magazine's trademark. Nowhere is this background more evident than in the closing of the second chapter when McKibben explains why the "green-house effect" is an apt name for the global warming problem.

"We have built a greenhouse, a human creation," he writes, "where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."

This thought is central to The End of Nature, and it represents a highly unusual effort to look at all the ramifications of the global warming problem. Although its flaws are obvious, The End of Nature is as fresh as the endless stream of "end" theories is stale.