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Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever. McKibben writes of our earth's environmental cataclysm, addressing such core issues as the greenhouse effect, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. His new introduction addresses some of the latest environmental issues that have risen during the 1990s. The book also includes an invaluable new appendix of facts and figures that surveys the progress of the environmental movement. More than simply a handbook for survival or a doomsday catalog of scientific prediction, this classic, soulful lament on Nature is required reading for nature enthusiasts, activists, and concerned citizens alike.

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Nature, we believe, takes forever.  It moves with infinite slowness throught the many periods of its history, whose names we dimly recall from high school biology - the Devonian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous, the Pleistocene.  Ever since Darwin, nature writers have taken pains to stress the incomprehensible length of this path.  "So slowly, oh, so slowly have the great changes been brought about," wrote John Burroughs at the turn of the century.  "The Orientals try to get a hint of eternity by saying that when the Himalayas have been ground to a powder by allowing a gauze veil t o float against them once in a thousand years, eternity will have only just begun.  Our mountains have been pulverized by a process almost as slow."  We have been told that man's tenure is as a minute to the earth's day, but it is that vast day which has lodged in our minds.  The age of the trilobites began some 600 million years ago.  The dinosaurs lived for nearly 140 million years.  Since even a million years is utterly unfathomable, the message is:  Nothinkg happens quickly.  Change takes unimaginable - "geologic"- time. This idea about time is essentially mistaken.  Muddled though they are scientifically, the creationists, believing in the sudden appearance of hte earth some seven thousand years ago, may intuitively understand more about hte progress of time than hte rest of us.  For the world as we know it - that is, the world with human beings formed into some sort of civilization, the world in which North America, Europe, and much of the rest of the planet are warm enough to support large human populations - is of quite comprehensible duration.  People began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some ten or twelve thousand years ago.  Using thirty years as a generation, that is three hundred and thirty to four hundred generations ago.  Sitting here at my desk, I can think back five generations in my family - I have seen photos of four.  That is, I can think back nearly one-sixtieth of the way to the start of civilization.  A skilled geneaologist might get me one-thirtieth of the distance back.  And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived.  From the work of archaeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the pharaohs, which is more than a third of the way. Two hundred and sixty-five generations ago Jericho was a walled city of three thousand souls.  Two hundred and sixty-five is a large number, but not in the way that six million is a large number - not inscrutably large. Or look at it this way: There are plants on this earth as old as civilization.  Not species - individual plants.  The General Sherman tree in California's Sequoia National Park may be a third as old, about four thousand years.  Certain Antarctic lichens date back ten thousand years.  A specific creosote plant in the Southwestern desert was estimated recently to be 11,700 years of age. And within that ten or twelve thousand years of civilization, of course, time is not uniform.  The world as we really, really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution.  the world we actually feel comfortable in dates back to perhaps 1945.  It was not until after World War II, for instance, that plastics came into widespread use. In other words, our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion.  True, evolution, grinding on ever so slowly, has taken billions of years to create us from slime, but that does not mean that time always moves so ponderously.  Events, enormous events, can happen quickly.  We've known this to be true since Hiroshima, of course, but I don't mean that quickly.  I mean that over a year or a decade or a lifetime big and impersonal and dramatic changes can take place.  We're now comfortable with the bizarre idea that continents can drift over eons, or that continent can die in an atomic second; even so, normal time seems to us immune to such huge changes.  It isn't, though.  In the last three decades, for example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased more than 10 percent, from about 315 to more than 350 parts per million.  In the last decade, an immense "hole" in the ozone layer has opened above  the South Pole.  In the last half-decade, the percentage of West German forests damaged by acid rain has risen from less than 10 to more than 50.  According to the Worldwatch Institute, in 1988 - for perhaps the first time since that starved Pilgrim winter at Plymouth - America ate more food than it grew.  Burroughs again:  "One summer day, while I was walking along the country rode on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or four yards distant, suddenly fell down.  Amid the general stillness and immobility around me, the effect was quite startling ... It was the sudden summing up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the wall.  A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest." Excerpted from The End of Nature by Bill McKibben All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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CHOICE Review

At best, a decidedly futile attempt to emulate Rachel Carson's epic Silent Spring (1962) or maybe even Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949). The author focuses on hydro- and chlorofluoro-carbons (among other atmospheric pollutants) and their effects on the global (and hence local) atmosphere. Although the author's use of timely, critical information is laudatory, his overly simplistic journalistic style makes it difficult for those who would like to verify accuracy of representation or to pursue a matter in greater detail. The often highly personalistic ruminations about life in the Adirondacks are highly distracting from what is presumed to be the primary objective--a "silent spring" warning about our climatic environment. No bibliography or illustrations. The rather rambling, often redundantly repetitive, iteration of the climatic woes of the world leaves one frustrated. This is indeed a serious matter, but the seriousness gets lost in peregrinations in the author's back yard. Not recommended for academic libraries. -E. J. Kormondy, University of Hawaii at Hilo

Booklist Review

McKibben explores and explains the environmental cataclysms and global climate changes (known as the greenhouse effect) facing planet Earth.

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Bill McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. After quitting this job, he soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in 2006. McKibben's latest book is entitled, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. 030 (Bowker Author Biography)