Eaarth is about “the news!” The kind of news that someone shares with the breathless preface: “Did you hear?!” Kennedy’s been shot; Diana’s dead; Lennon’s dead; the sky is falling; the earth is, if not dead, at least different. Disfigured. New.The news is not good. In some ways it is a doctor’s report. He’s looked at the charts and things aren’t good. They disease is chronic and irreversible, so changes need to be made. The patient (us) will need to quit smoking, for one thing. Smoking cars and coalstacks and generally burning oil or pouring it onto crops just isn’t gonna work; it’s not part of the new diet.
That this kind of news isn’t actually current affairs, front page news is distressing. The fact that so much of our news is mindless, uncritical and uninformative, and serves to blindfold and distract us more than inform us, is one of the messages that comes out of Eaarth’s first section. In it, McKibben attempts to force us to notice what the current situation really is. This is a valuable act from an informed and passionate writer. McKibben is a “scholar in residence” and reading this book shows that perhaps we need more of them: people whose role it is to be the backstop for newspapers. But it also shows that being a “scholar in residence” doesn’t mean you produce a book where the organization and presentation matches the number of references you list or factoids you parade. Having a critically important message for the world and a poetic idea doesn’t mean you produce a cohesive and persuasive book. Maybe it’s the problem of having editors working with experts who’ve been leaders in their field for years: this book reads like it went from first draft to copy editor, with no one in between saying: “Hey. I know you’re great and all and wrote one of the most important environmental books ever (apparently), but how about you go back and think about it some more.” Structural editing is tricky, and the relationship between editor and writer must be tricky, especially when writing a book that is above all about being urgent and timely and in a few months may be yesterday’s news. But I wonder how many readers this book missed because it missed something in the revision stage that would have taken it three steps up in quality and made it really memorable and compelling.
The bad news for Eaarth, from my point of view:
Reading Eaarth is like being harassed by an incredibly well informed environmental activist (Greenpeace or some such group) who is standing at the corner of some street with a clipboard, hoping to persuade me to join something, sign something, commit to a monthly donation, using whatever means necessary.
I have a lot of sympathy for Greenpeace or pretty much any such group, but I tend to want to cross the street. I don’t want to give them my money or my time. Maybe I’m a selfish, self-centred, nature-hating bastard who doesn’t care about whether or not there’ll be a viable planet, let alone any decent national parks or old-growth forests, for anyone’s grandkiddies to inherit. Maybe I’m a tight-arse. Maybe I’m simply shy to the point of being anti-social, and conversations with strange strangers freak me out. I confess to worrying that by my actions if not my thoughts, I may be all of these things. But I do know for certain that the thing that really pisses me off about those clipboard-wavers is that they’re so damned well-informed, and yet so utterly incapable of speaking coherently. They tell me that global warming has already reached a point where all the world’s coral reefs will be dead by 2050, that dengue fever is spreading across Bangladesh and South America, that borer insects have killed off vast tracts of the Canadian forests, that American farmers use too many chemicals growing their vast mono-crops, and that the world’s highest ski run no longer exists, as the glacier it ran down has melted. And therefore I should think globally, act locally, and sign up to give them more of my time and some of my money.
To describe the failure of their argument in terms coined by Plato, they’ve mixed their scientific and their poetic arguments, and the result leaves me just frustrated that they’re saying so much without actually making sense. Proper, constructive, truth-telling, logically persuasive, sense. And it’s the poetry that gets in the way.
Bill McKibben’s book is called Eaarth. The title is McKibben’s new name for the world we now inhabit, which is like Earth, but a little different. It has been fundamentally altered by climate change, and in case you weren’t aware, climate change makes things grow extra vowels.
McKibben says a whole bunch (to use his homely north American lexicon) of important stuff, but the book itself is mush. There are books I would like to rewrite, or perhaps send to Jared Diamond to rewrite, and this is one. Someone with an eye for logic, or logiclessness, needs to weed out sentences like: “When the world heats up, animals get smaller, and so should our governments.” This is a poetic connection which persuades me that McKibben is unaware of how to persuade me. Maybe it works for others, but I look at that sentence and think: what am I supposed to do with that correlation of ideas? It seems that I am supposed to imagine myself as a kangaroo mouse (which is a small marsupial capable of shedding excess heat quickly and efficiently) or a Scottish sheep (a species which has been found to have shrunk by 3% as global temperatures have gone up) and then imagine that my existence as a kangaroo-mouse/Scottish-sheep allows me a particular insight into the appropriate size of governments, and then imagine that this perfect government, as imagined by me as kangaroo-mouse-Scottish-sheep, is small. And once I’ve jumped through these imaginative hoops, obviously, the point is that I’m supposed to be convinced. For me, I’m just convinced that either I’m missing something or McKibben is making connections which are just bogus. And I don’t want that for this book, because what he says is vital and true.
Of course – and how often is this true? – for a non-American reader, it’s frustrating to read a book which writes about global issues with such a narrow world view. The tracts of examples of dengue fever in Bangladesh and Australia’s quiet redesign of a port to allow for sea-level rises seem to me to be all written with his eyes firmly focused on how those examples might be either a model or a warning to Americans. It’s that odd inversion of the old slogan “think globally, act locally” in which the idea of whether really caring about something goes with thinking or with acting. In this case it seems that the Reader is assumed to be (along with the writer) interested in being globally aware, but is really only concerned about themselves and their local community – How much will it cost to fix the road? How often will it flood? Can I get insurance? Will my business fail or thrive? How much will food cost me?
If these are the questions we build our response on, I wonder if the communities we create could ever have any hope of not destroying the ecosystems on which they’re built. Maybe that’s something all of us living or aspiring to live by the American model could do with some thinking about. Again, that’s probably a project for Jared Diamond, not Bill McKibben.
I wonder if it’s a case of baby steps. Is it possible to think selfishly about the right things as a step towards not thinking selfishly? Or do we need to chuck the whole system and jump? The question of what kind of animals humans are – social and communal or selfish and political – is one I think we create as we answer it. If we say we are selfish: we don’t just give ourselves permission to be selfish (bad enough), we make it silly and foolish and ridicule those who aren’t selfish, who aren’t acquiring cars and boats and big TVs. So I’m not sure asking these questions – How will it affect me? How much will it cost me? How hard will I have to “bunker down” to use McKibben’s phrase – is going to help that much. We need to critically understand, articulate and change the assumptions about the connection between me and us. This is an act of re-imagining, of creating a new language, that McKibben hints at. But he is still very firmly in a mindset that wants to, but doesn’t have the creative power to get anyone off the train we’re currently on.
The good news for Eaarth, from my point of view:
Eaarth is a book that should be read. It is like talking to a person and hearing from them the poorly articulated combination of tears and hope in his voice. He is attached to the landscape around his house and, surprisingly, to the internet, and to the hope of a connected group of small and large communities making a difference.
It’s this combination of emotions that would have better structured the book. It already does in some ways, but a clearer understanding of and separation of the book into personal anecdote, where he shares how he feels and why, and scientific reasoning, where he persuades his Reader that what he’s feeling is not just a personal experience but a general one, would have been good. I had to claw my way through to thinking about the book in this way, but it was possible and worthwhile. I also had to let go of the idea that McKibben is simply arguing that we should feel how he feels just because, like everyone else, having others feel like he does would make him feel good, but this, too, was possible and worthwhile.
And the future he writes about is interesting. It stimulates thoughts and ideas about how the future might be, and about what is important, and that act and those conversations are worthwhile. As McKibben points out, we’re beyond the point where anything is possible. It’s probably not possible to save any of the world’s coral reef systems. It is not possible to stop the planets weather systems from being different from what they were 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. But there are still lots of opportunities, still lots of things that are possible and worthwhile.
In amongst the mush of facts and unclever metaphor, McKibben does articulate the urgency of the issue and some sense of how that urgency can be used creatively to make the most of the opportunities that exist, even as they are steadily shrinking.
Four mushrooms