The End of Nature.

ON POLITICAL BOOKS IT' NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE

The End of Nature (*1) 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. It is being promoted as The Fate of the Earth comes to the environment. The End of Nature has little relation with the hype package that accompanies it. The book does not call the earth doomed, though McKibben, a former New Yorker writer who specializes in environmental affairs, is glum about several currentecological trends, particularly global warming. Nor will readers find it a brooding, strident tract. 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.

"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." 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 singled man." He devotes a delightful paragraph to military ruminations over whether global warming, by shrinking the polar ice cap that Soviet nuclear missile submarine use for cover, will confer an advantage on the U.S.

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 beginning of the end. 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.

Conventional wisdom does sometimes handicap McKibben's thinking. He repeatedly declares that weather changes are "permanent" or "irrevocable," that "no normal situation" can ever return. These assertions fit squarely in the cultural tradition of success-through-doomsday prophecy, but I found them hard to swallow even as a believer that the greenhouse effect is a genuine cause for alarm. 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.

In the main, however, The End of Nature takes an admirably nuanced view of the earth's affairs. McKibben is careful to acknowledge the arguments against environmental panic, and 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 mosters and oafs.

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. McKibben says, for example, that although many of the forests man has cut may someday be replanted, they can never again be "natural"--the next generation of redwoods will grow in neat rows, plunked down by mechanical planters, instead of springing up at random. He posits, grudgingly, that global warming and ozone depletion might be controlled by technology. But to McKibben, the thought of such "ecological management" is abhorrent, since even if successful it would still be artificial. "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. Hydro reservoirs in Quebec "have altered an area larger than Switzerland," McKibben writes disdainfully, with the simple fact of alteration being damning to him. This leads to the first of three shortcomings in McKibben's analysis.

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. 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. 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. Perhaps. But here McKibben has inadvertently provided an argument that we might as well go on paving. If nature is already ruined for good, why shouldn't humans amuse themselves by doing as they please to the landscape?

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; 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.

"Deep" ecologists are often accused of taking an antihuman line because they dislike or at least can't deal with their fellow man. 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. 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!" Thinking that man should avoid slaughtering alligators or destroying their habitats is one thing; 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. If it's wrong for humans to kill alligators, the reverse also applies.

Then again, in the unspoiled realm that The End of Nature extols, killing is not wrong but, rather a way of life. "Wrong" is an invention of human intellect, a perturbation in the naturally amoral universe. 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. 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.

But McKibben seems a peacefu and God-fearing person, declaring himself a practicing Methodist; 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. So a more likely explanation for McKibben's mild antihuman bias is the common, and understandable, desire to be alone with nature. 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. 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. 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.

It is fair, of course, to condemn as unnatural humanity's innumerable foolish and environmentally damaging acts. But to reject human existence and intelligence as part of nature does nature an injustice. 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. Penicillin? It can be found in a pure-natural, spontaneously occuring state, though that form is so exceptionally toxic some people die from allergic reactions. (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? Penicillin analogs like this are less harsh but cannot be found in nature. Should she be allowed the synthesized chemicals of anesthesia? Should children be allowed to have the Sabin vaccine, since it involves artificial denaturing of the polio virus and furthermore disrupst the life cycle and natural propagation of a spontaneously arising form of RNA?

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." Somehow I doubt McKibben could bring himself to say such words. 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.

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. Why? Nature conducts genetic engineering experiments on a continual basis; every creature that exists today is the result of one. 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 riht to exist we worry about preserving would not exist to be preserved.

Finally McKibben slips through the intellectual trap door of complaining about the effects of current political and social policies but offering no concrete alternatives. The End of Nature proffers the idea that, in general, people ought to restrict their lifestyles and burn less fossil fuel. 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." To save gasoline, "there are weeks when we do not venture out [of the house] at all."

Okay, but on those monthly shopping trips, what do the McKibbens purchase? Products of modern industry would be my guess; for instance, the author concedes he recently acquired a fax machine. Practically all products available in today's stores--even organic produce, stone ground bread, and handmade wool sweaters--involved, at some level, raw materials consumption and manufacturing processes that disrupt the immaculate form of nature McKibben believes in. McKibben defends his fax as, well, environmentally sound because such devices cut down on fuel used to deliver physical mail. 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. And those products the McKibbens do buy could neither be made nor distributed if the typical U.S. workder did not venture out of his house.

It's true that any one individual boycotting industry by refusing to purchase fax machines, Endust, or anything else would have zero effect. 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?

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. . . . 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." Don't you generate about the same volume of laundry whether you have five shirts in rotation or 500? 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?

I caution that the above passage is about the weakest one in a book normally characterized by insight, calm reflection, and impressive reasoning. It also occurs in the context of a beautifully written argument that materialism is an albatross around humanity's neck. Moving away from materialism, McKibben says, "is disturbing in a way that an idea, say, like Marxism is not. 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 goint to be factories." 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.

But how are such goals to be accomplished? Westerners are currently programmed fro 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. It's not enough to proclaim wistfully that human behavior toward nature must change. Specific reforms that can actually be put into practice by real-world political systems are what the enviroment needs today.

(*1) The End of Nature. Bill McKibben. Random House, $19.95.

Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor of Newsweek, the Atlantic, and The Washington Monthly.