Global Warming and Political Power

Abstract

In 1989, The End of Nature warned about the onset of global warming. Rereading it today, that warning seems more a background illustration of a larger message: We have grown collectively as large and powerful as any force of nature. In wrestling with that revelation, Bill McKibben called into question the collective self-image we have nurtured since we first became a civilized species. His deeply personal expression of the profound spiritual crisis that understanding engendered makes this book an extraordinary piece of literature. Its primary shortcoming, in this author’s view, is his attribution of the crisis to an antiquated set of human values that prevents us from fully understanding the new context in which we live. But he perhaps may be underestimating a much less ephemeral obstacle: the obstruction of large and determined economic interests, the survival of which depends on our failure to acknowledge our profoundly altered relationship with nature.