Get used to it

Too little, too late?

Bill McKibben, probably the nation’s leading environmentalist, argues in “Eaarth’’ that we have already so thoroughly altered the physical features of the planet (to an extent that he has renamed it with an extra “a’’) that we must start preparing for a radically simplified lifestyle. Important strands of environmental thought merge in McKibben’s new book, making for some truly scary reading and prompting urgent questions about the nature of the environmental catastrophe at hand.

The evidence of change on the planet deserves a serious hearing: “The Arctic ice cap is melting, and the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans . . . are distinctly more acid and their level is rising. . . . The vast inland glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and the giant snowpack of the American West, are melting very fast, and within decades the supply of water to the billions of people living downstream will dwindle. The great rain forest of the Amazons is drying on its margins and threatened at its core. . . . The great storehouses of oil beneath the earth’s crust are now more empty than full. Every one of these things is completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilization.’’

One of the fundamental principles of environmentalism is to act preemptively if there is a reasonable suspicion that change is irreversible. Caution, rather than acting after the fact, is the guiding rule. Yet our politics are so disjointed from environmental reality that we have a difficult time even framing the problem. This is where McKibben excels, in not offering palliatives such as concentrated urban living as a panacea or the false hope that new technologies to overcome our dependence on fossil fuels are just around the corner.

Techno-optimists believe that we can continue our present levels of consumption without enormous environmental destruction. To McKibben’s credit, he’s not having any part of such escapism. Modernity, as McKibben correctly understands it, is at bottom a sophisticated cultural machine to take advantage of the abundant energy of cheap fossil fuels: “One barrel of oil yields as much energy as twenty-five thousand hours of human manual labor — more than a decade of human labor per barrel. The average American uses twenty-five barrels each year, which is like finding three hundred years of free labor annually.’’ Modern humans, he observes, are basically “bipedal devices for combusting fossil fuel.’’

We cannot consume fossil fuels and other nonrenewable natural resources at the present pace forever; as McKibben recognizes, this is all the more inconceivable when China, India, and other emerging economies aspire to consume at our level. Simple math suggests that extrapolating American levels of consumption, much of it wasteful, to a planet of 7 billion people cannot work.