Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

What I have to say about this book is very simple: read it, please.- Straight through to the end.- Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important.- - Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Twenty years ago, in The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming.- Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he argues, we need to acknowledge that weve waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already underway.- Our old familiar planet is melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in ways humans have never seen.- Weve created a new planet, still recognisable but fundamentally different.- In Eaarth, McKibben surveys the changes already taking place and considers what they will mean for our future. Adapting to our new home wont be easy.- It will be expensive - and the natural resources on which our economy is built have been damaged and degraded.- Our survival depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back, concentrating on essentials and creating the kinds of communities that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale.- Change - fundamental change - will be our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance. Bill McKibben foresaw the end of nature very early on, and in this new book he blazes a path to help preserve natures greatest treasures. - James E. Hansen, director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies -