The End of Nature

When I was a grade student at KU I read Bill McKibben's The End of Nature. This book was probably my first introduction to the idea of anthropogenic climate change. However, that wasn't the book's main thrust and it wasn't what I took away from it at the time. I was very interested in the history of the American construction of nature as an ideal. The ideal of nature as wilderness was still very potent culturally, McKibben acknowledged, but, he argued, wilderness in nature was thoroughly extinct. It had gone the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon and wasn't coming back. I don't think McKibben used the term Anthropocene. Don't hold me to that. But he was contending a variation of that notion, the idea that history has seen a breaking point where natural systems, even at basic levels of earth chemistry, have been so profoundly impacted by human activities that one could no longer speak of a separate nature, a first nature if you will. Everything on Earth was now in some sense unnatural, or part of what historian Richard Wright called a Second Nature, living things and physical systems in varying degrees separate form culture, but now no longer entirely autonomous from it.

I've returned to thinking about this book because of what Bill had to say about climate. It's interesting to hear his future as a climate activist already well articulated. As my climate activism picks up pace, I'm reading it again to see if I can remember why I put climate on the backbench of my own attention at that time in my life.

http://books.google.com/books?id=q0aM5t5GMpsC&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20end%20of%20nature%20bill%20mckibben&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false