{"id":541741,"date":"2010-04-23T08:55:49","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T12:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/climateprogress.org\/?p=23470"},"modified":"2010-04-23T08:55:49","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T12:55:49","slug":"bill-mckibben-on-%e2%80%98eaarth%e2%80%99-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/541741","title":{"rendered":"Bill McKibben on \u2018Eaarth\u2019 Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We have created a new planet<\/a>. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago \u2014 call it \u201cEaarth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bill McKibben co-founded 350.org<\/a>. <\/em>This Wonk Room <\/em>repost<\/a> excerpts his new book, “EAARTH<\/a>: Making A Life in a Tough New World.” <\/em>. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>I wrote the preface to my new book EAARTH<\/em> on a gorgeous spring afternoon in 2009, perched on the bank of a brook high along the spine of the Green Mountains, a mile or so from my home in the Vermont mountain town of Ripton. The creek burbles along, the picture of a placid mountain stream, but a few feet away there\u2019s a scene of real violence a deep gash through the woods where a flood in the summer of 2008 ripped away many cubic feet of tree and rock and soil and drove it downstream through the center of the village. Before the afternoon was out, the only paved road into town had been demolished by the rushing water<\/a>, a string of bridges lay in ruins, and the governor was trying to reach the area by helicopter.<\/p>\n

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming, which in those days we called the \u201cgreenhouse effect.\u201d That book, The End of Nature<\/a><\/em>, was mainly a philosophical argument. It was too early to see the practical effects of climate change but not too early to feel them; in the most widely excerpted passage of the book, I described walking down a different river, near my then-home sixty miles away, in New York\u2019s Adirondack Mountains. Merely knowing that we\u2019d begun to alter the climate meant that the water flowing in that creek had a different, lesser meaning. \u201cInstead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, the rain had become a subset of human activity,\u201d I wrote. \u201cThe rain bore a brand; it was a steer, not a deer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, that sadness has turned into a sharper-edged fear. Walking along this river today, you don\u2019t need to imagine a damned thing<\/strong> \u2014 the evidence of destruction is all too obvious. Much more quickly than we would have guessed in the late 1980s, global warming has dramatically altered, among many other things, hydrological cycles. One of the key facts of the twenty-first century turns out to be that warm air holds more water vapor than cold: in arid areas this means increased evaporation and hence drought. And once that water is in the atmosphere, it will come down, which in moist areas like Vermont means increased deluge and flood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In our Vermont town, in the summer of 2008, we had what may have been the two largest rainstorms in our history<\/a> about six weeks apart. The second and worse storm, on the morning of August 6, dropped at least six inches of rain in three hours up on the steep slopes of the mountains. Those forests are mostly intact, with only light logging to disturb them but that was far too much water for the woods to absorb. One of my neighbors, Amy Sheldon, is a river researcher, and she was walking through the mountains with me one recent day, imagining the floods on that August morning. \u201cYou would have seen streams changing violently like that,\u201d she said, snapping her fingers. \u201cA matter of minutes.\u201d A year later the signs persisted: streambeds gouged down to bedrock, culverts obliterated, groves of trees laid to jackstraws. . . .<\/p>\n

Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It\u2019s our reality. We\u2019ve changed the planet, changed it in large and fundamental ways. And these changes are far, far more evident in the toughest parts of the globe, where climate change is already wrecking thousands of lives daily. In July 2009, Oxfam released an epic report, \u201cSuffering the Science<\/a>,\u201d which concluded that even if we now adapted \u201cthe smartest possible curbs\u201d on carbon emissions, \u201cthe prospects are very bleak<\/a> for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world\u2019s poorest.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so EAARTH<\/em> is, by necessity, less philosophical than its predecessor. We need now to understand the world we\u2019ve created, and consider urgently how to live in it. We can\u2019t simply keep stacking boulders against the change that\u2019s coming on every front; we\u2019ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations. There\u2019s nothing airy or speculative about this conversation; it\u2019s got to be uncomfortable, staccato, direct.<\/p>\n

Which doesn\u2019t mean that the change we must make or the world on the other side will be without its comforts or beauties. Reality always comes with beauty, sometimes more than fantasy. But hope has to be real. It can\u2019t be a hope that the scientists will turn out to be wrong, or that President Barack Obama can somehow fix everything. Obama can help but precisely to the degree he\u2019s willing to embrace reality, to understand that we live on the world we live on, not the one we might wish for. Maturity is not the opposite of hope; it\u2019s what makes hope possible.<\/p>\n

From the Book EAARTH<\/a>: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben. Copyright (c) 2010 by Bill McKibben. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}