IT'S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE
Easterbrook, Gregg
IT'S NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE Bill McKibben's warnings about global warming, genetic engineering, and the albatross of materialism are at once gentle and startling. But what's so bad about...
...Dangerous chemicals are manufactured naturally, too—among them carbon dioxide, the key greenhouse gas, whose annual natural production exceeds artificial emission by about 30 to 1.) Ampicillin...
...for instance, the author concedes he recently acquired a fax machine...
...Nature conducts genetic engineering experiments on a continual basis...
...Hydro reservoirs in Quebec "have altered an area larger than Switzerland," McKibben writes disdainfully, with the simple fact of alteration being damning to him...
...McKibben admiringly quotes the naturalist John Muir writing of the alligator, "Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty...
...Second, McKibben discards the notion that man's own existence is part of nature: our being derived from the natural scheme just as the being of any fish or fowl...
...It's true that any one individual boycotting industry by refusing to purchase fax machines, Endust, or anything else would have zero effect...
...Should children be allowed to have the Sabin vaccine, since it involves artificial denaturing of the polio virus and furthermore disrupts the life cycle and natural propagation of a spontaneously arising form of RNA...
...It is fair, of course, to condemn as unnatural humanity's innumerable foolish and environmentally damaging acts...
...Penicillin analogs like this are less harsh but cannot be found in nature...
...If it's wrong for humans to kill alligators, the reverse also applies...
...Somehow I doubt McKibben could bring himself to say such words...
...McKibben defends his fax as, well, environmentally sound because such devices cut down on fuel used to deliver physical mail...
...The End of Nature is instead a gentle, splendid book written in an unfailingly reasonable tone, enriched by many touches of warmth and affectionate wit...
...Should she be allowed the synthesized chemicals of anesthesia...
...McKibben says, for example, that although many of the forests man has cut may someday be replanted, they can never again be "naturar—the next generation of redwoods will grow in neat rows, plunked down by mechanical planters, instead of springing up at random...
...Conventional wisdom does sometimes handicap McKibben's thinking...
...He devotes a delightful paragraph to military ruminations over whether global warming, by shrinking the polar ice cap that Soviet nuclear missile submarines use for cover, will confer an advantage on the U.S...
...Isn't the fuel expenditure going to be about the same whether one common washing machine chugs all day long or lots of individual household machines run intermittently...
...He devotes several sections to sympathetic descriptions of outdoorsmen or eccentrics who spend extended periods of time completely withdrawn from human contact, reveling in being the sole person on a mountain trail...
...Consider this section from The End of Nature on fuel conservation: "To cope with the greenhouse effect, people may need to install more efficient washing machines...
...But if you buy such a machine and yet continue to feel it's both your right and your joy to have a big wardrobe, then the essential momentum of our course won't be broken...
...Since the book went to press during an unusually cool summer, it probably will be needled in some quarters on the contention that 1989 debunks the greenhouse effect, though statistically neither year proves either case...
...Perhaps...
...Penicillin...
...I caution that the above passage is about the weakest one in a book normally characterized by insight, calm reflection, and impressive reasoning...
...The End of Nature...
...there is some discussion of religious values in The End of Nature, though the book does not attempt to address the question of whether God is a component of pure nature or another mettlesome intellect...
...He admits to harboring some desire that everyone else would vamoose from the woods around his Adirondack home, the better for his appreciation of unspoiled majesty...
...Parts of The End of Nature were composed during the 1988 summer heat wave and thus reflect last year's conventional wisdom that 1988 marked the Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of Newsweek, the Atlantic, and The Washington Monthly...
...So a more likely explanation for McKibben's mild antihuman bias is the common, and understandable, desire to be alone with nature...
...He posits, grudgingly, that global warming and ozone depletion might be controlled by technology...
...The End of Nature has little relation with the hype package that accompanies it...
...Products of modern industry would be my guess...
...To gator glory First he argues, in effect, that for most of the ecosphere only pure preservation—not building or moving a thing—would have been responsible on man's part...
...The End of Nature accepts that cleanups and restoration projects mean little because, once land or water has been touched by man, it is impossible to return to the metaphysically superior "nature" state...
...thinking that it is an amusing act of justice that a "terror-stricken" person—in practice, usually a small child—occasionally gets ripped to shreds by one of these predators is quite another...
...In the main, however, The End of Nature takes an admirably nuanced view of the earth's affairs...
...Surely the pure-nature response would be, "Let her die, death happens all the time in nature and it doesn't matter one damn bit...
...But to McKibben, the thought of such "ecological management" is abhorrent, since even if successful it would still be artificial...
...Otherwise it provides few specifics beyond declaring that the author and his wife keep their home at 55 degrees in winter, "shop [only] 12 times a year," and "try very hard not to think about how much we'd like a baby...
...And McKibben calls Thomas Midgley, the General Motors chemist who invented both chlorofluorocarbons and tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, the one "who may now hold the record for most banned substances produced by a single man...
...our interventions more dramatic in scale but no different in concept from those of the beaver that drowns out a meadow habitat when it dams a stream, or the climax trees that take over a forest and cut off smaller plants' access to sunlight, and so on...
...But what's so bad about penicillin...
...Wrong" is an invention of human intellect, a perturbation in the naturally amoral universe...
...Random House, $19.95...
...The book does not call the earth doomed, though McKibben, a former New Yorker writer who specializes in environmental affairs, is glum about several current ecological trends, particularly global warming...
...This leads to the first of three shortcomings in McKibben's analysis...
...On the other hand, you could slash your stock of clothes to a comfortable or even uncomfortable minimum, then chip in with your neighbors to buy a more efficient washing machine to which you would lug your dirty laundry...
...And I wonder why it seems to move him so little that humanity, for all its shortcomings and hypocrisies, has at least introduced into the natural scheme the concept that suffering and pointless dying ought to be opposed...
...Okay, but on those monthly shopping trips, what do the McKibbens purchase...
...If nature is already ruined for good, why shouldn't humans amuse themselves by doing as they please to the landscape...
...These assertions fit squarely in the cultural tradition of successthrough-doomsday prophecy, but I found them hard to swallow even as a believer that the greenhouse effect is a genuine cause for alarm...
...Either people are fundamentally part of nature, in which case our sprawl across the globe, for all its faults, must in some fundamental sense reflect a fruition of natural impetus, or are unnatural, in which case any kind of appeals to human higher instincts, such as in The End of Nature, are inherently preposterous...
...It's not enough to proclaim wistfully that human behavior toward nature must change...
...It is not all that radical to talk about who is going to own the factories, at least compared to the question of whether there are going to be factories...
...And those products the McKibbens do buy could neither be made nor distributed if the typical U.S...
...McKibben's thesis that any human invention, even an environmentally sound one, is metaphysically undesirable left me wondering what medicines he would permit his wife to have were she dying...
...Thinking that man should avoid slaughtering alligators or destroying their habitats is one thing...
...As anyone who has ever had the opportunity to behold the deep wilderness or far islands can attest, a sudden, almost irrationally intense irritation with the thought that any other person might be within miles is nearly impossible to combat...
...Finally McKibben slips through the intellectual trap door of complaining about the effects of current political and social policies but offering no concrete alternatives...
...But McKibben seems a peaceful and God-fearing person, declaring himself a practicing Methodist...
...Then again, in the unspoiled realm that The End of Nature extols, killing is not wrong but, rather a way of life...
...But since for a substantial portion of the world's surface the opportunity for pure preservation passed long ago, this is little more useful than arguing that Europe would be a nicer place to live if Napoleon had not started his wars...
...But to reject human existence and intelligence as part of nature does nature an injustice...
...beginning of the end...
...But they still must be built in factories, consume plastic and metals, rely on toxic chemicals for exposing fax images, and be powered by electricity that usually comes from burning fossil fuels or uranium...
...Regardless of whether the environment would be helped, diminished desire for material things would be good for our souls, reason enough to dream of smaller wardrobes and fewer shopping trips...
...Don't you generate about the same volume of laundry whether you have five shirts in rotation or 500...
...Deep" ecologists are often accused of taking an antihuman line because they dislike or at least can't deal with their fellow man...
...Environmentally sound is not the same as natural," he protests, objecting also to hydroelectric power, the most benign form of power available to current society...
...In places McKibben tries to have it both ways, simultaneously saying that man's existence is unnatural and objectionable and yet that the unique human conscience ought to bind man's behavior...
...Practically all products available in today's stores—even organic produce, stone ground bread, and handmade wool sweaters—involve, at some level, raw materials consumption and manufacturing processes that disrupt the immaculate form of nature McKibben believes in...
...The "end of nature" that the author decrees—he says it's already occurred—does not mean destruction of the ecosphere or cessation of life but rather the passing of earth's temporal arrangements as they have arisen spontaneously, unperturbed by conscious design...
...If the temperature [is] increasing a degree per decade," McKibben writes, "the forest surrounding my [northern New York State] home would be due at the Canadian border sometime around 2020...
...Nor will readers find it a brooding, strident tract...
...The End of Nature proffers the idea that, in general, people ought to restrict their lifestyles and burn less fossil fuel...
...McKibben is careful to acknowledge the arguments against environmental panic, an extreme sacrilege among environmentalists, and he shows charity toward the great mass of humanity that generates the core problem, whereas most environmental writing perches on the notion that all except the eco-enlightened are monsters and oafs...
...But if the results of even environmentally managed industrial activity are as dreadful as this book defines them, doesn't any acquiescence to the system—even so much as purchasing The End of Nature, made from felled trees treated with bulk acids, distributed by trucks burning fossil fuels—become a moral offense, impermissible regardless of magnitude...
...It can be found in a pure-natural, spontaneously occurring state, though that form is so exceptionally toxic some people die from allergic reactions...
...He repeatedly declares that weather changes are "permanent" or "irrevocable," that "no normal situation" can ever return...
...But how are such goals to be accomplished...
...Moving away from materialism, McKibben says, "is disturbing in a way that an idea, say, like Marxism is not...
...worker did not venture out of his house...
...But here McKibben has inadvertently provided an argument that we might as well go on paving...
...It also occurs in the context of a beautifully written argument that materialism is an albatross around humanity's neck...
...The End of Nature betrays some of this sentiment by calling grizzly bears "the continent's grandest mammals," a description with which I beg to differ...
...It is being promoted as The Fate of the Earth comes to the environment...
...every creature that exists today is the result of one...
...On global warming and ozone layer depletion, McKibben believes that all negative environmental and social trends in effect today are unalterable and can be reliably projected out into the future, while discarding the possibility that new ideas, inventions, social norms, or natural phenomena will rise up in opposition...
...To save gasoline, "there are weeks when we do not venture out [of the house] at all...
...Wardrobe woes McKibben is particularly anxious about genetic engineering, feeling that even if all goes well and this science is used only constructively (for instance to eliminate the need to administer vaccines), engineered people, plants, and animals will lose life's transcendental stature...
...by Gregg Easterbrook The End of Nature* has become, prior to publication, one of the fall's big books principally on the expectation that it will argue that everything about the environment is horrifying beyond reprieve, a thought that packages well, and appeals to media bookers...
...Westerners are currently programmed for materialism, Third Worlders are programmed for overpopulation, and nearly all earth's pristine acres have already, for good or ill, been touched by the hand of man...
...Had genetic changes somehow been banned, say, 20 million years ago, not only would humans now not be present to worry about global warming, virtually all the current species whose right to exist we worry about preserving would not exist to be preserved...
...Specific reforms that can actually be put into practice by real-world political systems are what the environment needs today...
Vol. 21 • October 1989 • No. 9
