The Trouble With Bill McKibben’s ‘Eaarth,’ and the Promise of Environmentalism 2.0

By Theo Anderson Bill McKibben, the influential and prolific environmentalist, has a new book out. It’s titled Eaarth--and that isn’t a typo. McKibben argues that human activity has changed the earth radically in the past few decades, so that the planet we were born into no longer exists. The most important change has to do with water: warmer temperatures equal more evaporation. “What goes up must come down, and what’s coming down are these intense precipitation events,” which are evidence of “a world run amuck.” And this new world needs a new name. You have to admire McKibben’s talent and energy: he’s been hammering at this theme for more than two decades now (Salon has an interview with him here). The book that established his reputation, The End of Nature (1989), argues the same fundamental point: the human footprint is so large that we’ve passed a point of no return. In other words, our decisions now determine the shape of the planet’s future—and whether we have a future. We broke it, we own it. And it’s hard to quibble with much of what he says. He’s for the small-scale and the local: the “town meetings, farmers’ markets, [and] composting” that are so prevalent in the state where he lives, Vermont. I’m for those things, too, I think. But McKibben’s work seems a little off target. There’s an element of nostalgia in it that gets in the way of workable solutions. To the question of what we should do, if the apocalypse truly is approaching, he offers that the world should become more like Vermont. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Green Mountain State. (Trivia: it was the only state George W. Bush didn’t visit during his eight years in office.) But we know with certainty that the future won’t look more like Vermont. It will look like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York: more urban, with more diversity concentrated in smaller spaces. That’s the way things have been trending for centuries globally; it’s what’s going on in China with a vengeance; and it’s the future of Earth, Eaarth, or Eaaarth—whatever we want to call it. If you’re concerned about the environment, that's actually a good thing. Or has the potential to be. One of the best books I read last year was David Owen’s Green Metropolis, which lays out the case that New York City, particularly Manhattan, is among the greenest and most environmentally “sustainable” places in the U.S. This isn’t necessarily because New Yorkers care about their environmental impact more than the average person. It has to do with efficiencies of scale. People who live in densely populated spaces naturally use fewer resources than people living in sparsely populated suburbs and small towns. Conservation is just part of the fabric of daily life: people walk and bike more and own fewer cars; it costs far less, per capita, to heat and cool multi-unit buildings than single-family homes; distribution of food and mail and consumer goods is much more efficient; and the list goes on and on. No doubt, we can learn a lot from the small-scale, local ways of life that McKibben cherishes. But the truth is that dense urban spaces are our best hope, and there seems to be a growing recognition of that fact. Two books have been published in the past couple of months making a strong case for cities as the leading edge of Environmentalism 2.0--Joan Fitzgerald’s Emerald Cities and Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Urban Revolution. The virtue of this line of attack is that it works in cooperation with, and tries to make the most of, a trend that is inevitable, irreversible and accelerating. Here’s hoping it isn’t already too late.