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Introduction

I WRITE THIS INTRODUCTION in late fall of 2005 thinking back seventeen years to 1988 when, as a young man, I was hard at work on The End of Nature. It was the first book for a general audience about global warming; there were details then that no one yet knew. But—sadly—the story has played out as I expected at the time. By now, everyone knows more or less what’s going on. Still, it’s astounding to watch how deep and relentless the change has been. On this morning, for instance, Hurricane Wilma, the record-setting twenty-first named storm of the year, bears down on the Gulf of Mexico. The pressure in its center this morning was the lowest ever recorded in the Atlantic. It follows by a few weeks the unmatched destruction of Katrina—and by a few more weeks a paper in Nature demonstrating that on average hurricanes now last 60 percent longer and have peak winds 50 percent greater than a generation earlier.

Meanwhile, here are a few of the other developments on planet Earth in the last ten weeks:

• The scientists tracking Arctic sea ice reported that for the fourth year in a row it was diminishing, and at an accelerating pace—an area twice the size of Texas had vanished. As that melt progressed, it triggered its own feedback effect: instead of white ice to bounce the sun’s rays back out to space, blue water now absorbed that solar energy, amplifying the process. “We may have reached a tipping point,” one researcher said.

• A British team released a new study of soils, showing that as the planet has warmed and the period between frosts lengthened (winter is now eleven days shorter on average than in 1970), microbial activity in the top layers of the ground is increasing. This decay is in turn releasing carbon stored in the soil, again amplifying the greenhouse effect. And not by a trivial amount: The thirteen million tons of carbon released annually in the British Isles is enough to completely offset all the fairly ambitious work the British have done to change their energy practices in the last two decades.

• Similarly, researchers in Russia’s far north recently released data showing that the permafrost beneath the tundra is melting at record rates, and in the process releasing quantities of methane, another potent greenhouse gas. In fact, last winter so much methane was suddenly perking out to the surface that in places the bubbling kept open water from freezing.

In the late 1980s, we didn’t completely understand the sensitivity of the earth’s physical systems to small shifts in temperature. Most of the scientists I talked to then would not have predicted that a 1-degree rise in global average temperature—which is what we have so far caused—would be enough to so thoroughly disrupt the planet. But it has. The world is a different place—more chaotic, storm tossed, disease ridden. Here’s one way of saying it: in 1968, when I was a boy, Apollo 8 sent back the first pictures of our planet, that blue-white marble floating in space. Well, those pictures are as out of date as my high school yearbook photo. The planet doesn’t look like that or behave like that anymore—there’s more blue and less white, more cyclones swirling in the tropics. It’s a different Earth; we might as well hold a contest to pick a new name.

We also have a far better idea of what’s ahead than we did in 1989. The ever more finely calibrated computer models converge on a forecast of about 5 degrees additional warming in the course of this century unless we make heroic efforts to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. If that happens, the planet will be warmer than it’s been in at least thirty million years. Not warmer than it’s been in human history. Warmer than it’s been since before the beginning of primate evolution.

We begin to sense more clearly now what that might mean. Just to give one small example: Hurricane Katrina created a million refugees. Scientists using various computer models have calculated that there may be 150 million such refugees by mid-century—that is, 150 simultaneous Katrinas, most of them in the poorest parts of the low-lying tropics. And the computer models also hint at surprises lurking ahead—thresholds over which the world might trip as it warms so rapidly. For instance, all that melting Arctic ice could conceivably dilute the North Atlantic enough to slow or even stop the Gulf Stream.

Such forecasts should not distract from the immediate message: Global warming is not a problem for the future. It is here now, each year emerging with more power, each year closer to assuming its destiny as the most important fact in our politics, economies, and daily lives. That sense of imminence is new.

But if the cycles of the Earth now move more quickly—spring on average comes a week earlier across the Northern Hemisphere than it did just two decades ago—human society seems, at least on this most important of issues, to be paralyzed. Political and economic time has stood still for a decade: despite a few international conferences and grand declarations, we’ve done next to nothing to stem the flow of carbon dioxide that fuels global warming. In fact, the United States alone now pours nearly 15 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere than it did when this book was first published. In 1989, I said we needed to drive smaller cars and drive them less; in the intervening years, average Americans took to piloting vehicles that would turn General Patton green with envy. We’re not getting it.

It is the contrast between the pace at which the physical world is changing and the pace at which the human society is reacting that constitutes the key environmental fact of our time.

SVENTEEN YEARS AGO, those of us who were convinced that the climate was warming fast were out on a limb. A sturdy limb—the fact that carbon dioxide trapped heat near the planet seemed irrefutable—but a limb nonetheless. All the studies and reports that cataloged the greenhouse effect fit neatly on my desk when I was writing this book; the science was still, in many ways, rudimentary. And so it was no surprise when that science, and the conclusions drawn from it, came under attack. That’s how science works—each hypothesis tortured to find its weakness. By now, the studies on global warming would fill an airplane hangar. Postdocs have tapped into tundra, overflown rain forests, launched satellites, collected ancient pollen, counted tree rings, cored ice sheets, floated weather balloons, sent sound waves across entire oceans. Unlike the politicians, they really have worked overtime. And what have they learned? That the predictions of a decade ago were remarkably close to correct. We know a lot more about cloud formation and sulfur particles and sunspots than we did in 1989, but the expectation about how it will all sum out is essentially the same—human beings, with their cars and factories and burning rain forests, will increase the planet’s temperature 3 or 4 degrees in the century to come.

Accidents of one kind or another helped speed the scientific work. Most notably, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted with spectacular force in 1992, it filled the sky with an easily estimated quantity of various chemicals. The scientists running the various computer models of the planet’s climate could plug those estimates right into their programs and forecast what would happen in the years ahead. NASA’s James Hansen, who had already done more than anyone else to warn the world about the greenhouse effect, made the gutsiest call, issuing a precise prediction for how the planet’s temperature would shift, month by month, in the next three years. At first he seemed to have missed, and greenhouse skeptics jumped all over the early results, using them to call the whole theory into question. But at a memorable scientific meeting in Hawaii, Hansen stood up and said, “I believe this is one case where the model is right and the world is wrong.” And indeed, beginning with the very next month’s readings, global temperatures began to match his predictions with eerie precision. The incident was one of many that made climatologists more confident of their complex models, and by 1995 the scientific jury had delivered its verdict. The International Panel on Climate Change, a collection of 1,500 scientists assembled by the United Nations, summarized all the data and concluded with this dry but historic understatement: “The balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” The same panel, in 2001, hardened their language and toughened their forecast.

In other words, global warming no longer belonged in the category of distant and speculative threats. It was not like the danger of an asteroid strike. Instead, it was under way—we were in the rapids, not the smooth water above them. And, in fact, researchers increasingly insisted that they could see its effects, even in these relatively early stages. As the air warms, it should evaporate more water from the surface, and it should then drop that extra water back on the planet—in other words, there should be an increase both in drought and in rainfall. One would expect events like the forest fires that turned day into night across Malaysia and Indonesia in 1997, or like the flooding that struck China, Bangladesh, Korea, Mexico, and a dozen other places in 1998. A study reported two years ago by Thomas Karl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that “extreme precipitation events”—those storms that dump more than two inches of water in twenty-four hours—had increased 20 percent across our continent compared with 1900. That’s an almost unbelievable surge. “If you look out your window, part of what you see in terms of weather is produced by ourselves,” says Karl. “If you look out the window fifty years from now, we’re going to be responsible for more of it.” But the message of the rainfall and the ice melt, and the dramatic findings of the scientific community, has been muted, thanks to a powerful campaign of disinformation launched and funded by those industries that can’t imagine a future without fossil fuels.

In the past year, for instance, the most widely read account of global warming came from the novelist Michael Crichton, who argued it was all a ridiculous panic engineered by environmental groups to speed fund-raising. When the relevant Senate committee (chaired by Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, who has called climate change history’s “greatest hoax”) convened to take testimony this fall, they didn’t summon the hurricane scientists, or the soil scientists, or the ice scientists. They asked for … Crichton.

The tiny squad of climate-change skeptics, backed by lots of coal and oil money, never let up. Any tiny caveat in the deluge of studies—some scientist’s admission that the computer forecasts are by their very nature “uncertain”—is seized upon as conclusive proof that the whole greenhouse theory is a sham. In 1998, during the warmest year in our history to that point, a huge petition emerged, supposedly signed by thousands of scientists who think global warming won’t occur; after widespread coverage, it turned out to be a worthless compilation of undocumented names collected over the Internet, including such luminaries as the Spice Girls.

I repeat—seventeen years ago such reactions were not only to be expected, they were necessary. It was part of the process; if journalists had not sought balance from the competing scientific camps, they would not have been doing their jobs. But by now it is an intellectual fraud to continue spreading the notion that global warming is one more theory that may or may not prove true.

THE SCIENCE, however, was only one part of the original book—and not its most important. What mattered most to me was the inference I drew from that science: that for the first time human beings had become so large that they altered everything around us. That we had ended nature as an independent force, that our appetites and habits and desires could now be read in every cubic meter of air, in every increment on the thermometer.

This doesn’t make the consequences of global warming any worse in a practical sense, of course—we’d be in as tough a spot if the temperature was going up for entirely “natural” reasons. But to me it made this historical moment entirely different from any other, filled with implications for our philosophy, our theology, our sense of self. We are no longer able to think of ourselves as a species tossed about by larger forces—now we are those larger forces. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and tornadoes become not acts of God but acts of man. That was what I meant by the “end of nature.” Of course, everyone thinks they live at the hinge points of history. The academic debate that followed the book’s release was, and continues to be, lively; many critics claimed that we weren’t really “ending” nature because either we had been altering our surroundings for centuries, or we were a part of nature ourselves and hence couldn’t destroy it.

Both objections, of course, are true. Emerging into the world hairless, slow, and relatively weak, we’ve had to use our one asset—our largish brains—to alter our surroundings. We’ve changed the places where we lived, the places where we grew our food, and even to some extent the wildernesses surrounding them. On this continent, for instance, the Indians would periodically burn sections of forest and prairie to improve the hunting. But always before, our disruptions had some boundary to them; they were akin to the work of the beaver who lives next to me and manages to flood quite a large section of the lowland behind his dam. But there are plenty of places beyond the reach of his high water. Similarly, you could always find vast territory where human influence mattered not at all.

Beginning with the invisible releases of radiation, and then the toxic pollutants like DDT, and then the by-products of large-scale industrialization like acid rain, though, we began to alter even those places where we were not. Short of wide-scale nuclear war, global warming represents the largest imaginable such alteration: by changing the very temperature of the planet, we inexorably affect its flora, its fauna, its rainfall and evaporation, the decomposition of its soils. Every inch of the planet is different; indeed, the physics of climate means the most extreme changes are going on at the North and South poles, farthest from human beings. The by-products—the pollutants—of one species have become the most powerful force for change on the planet. This change in quantity is so large that it becomes a change in quality. The story of our moment, of these few short decades when we happen to be alive, is the story of crossing that threshold.

And of course it is also true that we are part of nature—indeed, over the last few centuries we’ve forgotten, to our peril, how connected we actually are to the rest of the fabric of creation. But to me this does not make our blundering alteration of everything around us any more defensible or any less sad. Imagine that you have hiked to the edge of a pond in the forest and stand there admiring the sunset. If you should happen to look down and see a Coke can that someone has tossed there in the rushes, it will affect you differently than if you see a pile of deer droppings. And the reason, or at least one reason, is our intuitive understanding that the person who dropped the Coke can didn’t need to, any more than we need to go on raising the temperature of the planet. We are different from the rest of the natural order, for the single reason that we possess the possibility of self-restraint, of choosing some other way.

WHICH BRINGS US around again to politics, to the realm where we will make the collective decision on whether or not to restrain ourselves. Seventeen years ago, I said I thought real change would be extremely difficult, because addressing the issue meant altering the fundamentals of our lives. In important ways, modern human beings are machines for burning fossil fuels. Therefore, to level off fossil fuel consumption, much less reduce it the 70 percent the scientists say is necessary, involves tinkering with virtually every facet of our daily lives. We would need to change the ways we move ourselves around, the spaces we live in, the jobs we perform, the food we eat.

It’s not that it can’t be done. I’ve spent much of the past two decades looking for ways out, for places that work. In a book called Hope, Human and Wild, I’ve written about the city of Curitiba, in Brazil, where the bus system is so marvelous that its citizens use a third less fuel than other Brazilians. I’ve spent time in the Indian state of Kerala, where, on an annual income of $300 and hence with minimal environmental impact on the globe, people have life expectancies, birthrates, and literacy rates that rival our own.

But such examples run completely counter to the trend of the past two decades. In 1989, when I wrote The End of Nature, we still fretted about what would happen to the environment if China became a consumer nation. I spent the summer just past in China, reporting on that country’s full emergence as an economic superpower. Now, we watch as they add the equivalent of Southern California’s generating capacity to their electric grid each year, almost all of it powered by coal. Not that China is the villain here—they are using that fossil fuel as we did a century ago, to pull people out of poverty. And their growth really underscores the staggering size of our own addiction—the average Chinese still only uses one-ninth as much energy as the average American. With the Cold War long since over, the most powerful ideology by far is consumerism—there is no place on the planet that does not fall under the enchantment of our images of the good life.

In some ways, the most dismal development of the last seventeen years—even more than the ever-darkening science—is the inability of the American political system to take seriously our peril. Nothing fundamental has shifted in our scientific understanding since 1988—as this book makes clear by its mere existence, we knew enough long ago to get to work, and if we had, our peril would be smaller. But we didn’t. A bipartisan effort to do nothing has been wildly successful. The Clinton-Gore administration oversaw the conversion of the American vehicle fleet from cars to semimilitary vehicles, and a resulting 15 percent increase in carbon emissions. George W. Bush renounced the Kyoto treaty within a few weeks of taking office, beginning the downfall of our public image around the world that has continued unabated. His administration’s energy plan foresees a future where we drill, mine, refine, and combust our way to 30 percent more carbon emissions within a generation.

This is particularly sad since in other ways an alternative future path is easier to envision than it was in 1989. Then, environmentalists talked about alternative energy with their fingers crossed: solar power was for noble aging hippies who wanted to mess around in their basements with an array of batteries. Now, the panels on my roof in the mountains of the Northeast tie directly into the grid. When the sun is out, I become a utility, with the pleasure of watching my electric meter spin backward. Wind power, though still a small source of power, is the fastest-growing means of electricity generation around the world. My hybrid Honda Civic gets me fifty-seven miles to the gallon.

So far, though, neither the new technologies nor the new crises seem to be spurring much demand for change.

One reason may be the intuitive sense that in some ways it’s too late to do anything about it all—that the physical forces we’ve unleashed are so large and terrifying that raising the gas tax a dime or even a dollar seems almost comically puny in comparison. In a way, this intuition is completely correct: it’s far too late to stop global warming. All we can do is make it less bad than it will otherwise be. Our crusade, if we ever mount it, will be on behalf of a relatively livable world, not on behalf of the world that we were born into.

THE SCARIEST PART of the chemistry of global warming involves “feedback loops”—the idea that as you raise the temperature you cause changes that will raise the temperature even more. If you warm the Arctic, for instance, thawing tundra may release huge amounts of carbon that will in turn accelerate the warming.

But in ending nature, in finishing off that separate realm that has always served to make us feel smaller, we’ve completed a feedback loop of our own. It’s harder to go to the forest now, or to the mountains, or to the ocean, or even to a patch of wildflowers and feel the same kind of wonderful smallness. Those Coke cans are everywhere. We’re everywhere.

I have had the great luxury of living in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont these past two decades—one of the few regions on the planet that gets more wild with each passing season. Thanks to the wisdom of the people of New York, the Adirondacks is a vast protected wilderness, one where people live in and among the rest of creation. You can still feel small here sometimes, which is for me the great antidote to despair. My daughter, now thirteen years old, has grown up with an abiding sense of nature’s size and peace and meaning. But even its untouched wildernesses are threatened by climate change and by the myriad of other human excesses. Its winters grow shorter, it summers hotter, its forests less stable. In the past decade, a great windstorm and an epic ice storm have passed through here, leveling thousands of square miles of forest. By the old way of reckoning, these were not disasters, just extreme incidences of the powerful forces that made this place. But now who knows what mixture of “nature” and of “us” they embody? Who knows what they mean?

So people sometimes ask: How should I cope with the sadness of watching nature end in our lifetimes, and with the guilt of knowing that each of us is in some measure responsible? The answer to the second part is easier: at the very least, we have to put up a good fight. I’ve worked on and written about materialism, population, and planning in the last decade, knowing that how well we control our numbers, our appetites, and the efficiency with which we satisfy those appetites will ordain just how desperate the situation becomes. They are the battles for our time, as morally compulsory as the battles for civil rights or against totalitarianism.

But even with that work, the sadness that drove me to write this book in the first place has not really lifted. This home of ours, the blessed hunk of rock and sky and biology that we were born onto, becomes each day a less complex and a more violent place; its rhythms of season and storm shifted and shattered. We didn’t create this world, but we are busy decreating it. Still the sun rises; still the moon wanes and waxes; but they look down on a planet that means something different than it used to. Something less than it used to. This buzzing, blooming, mysterious, cruel, lovely globe of mountain, sea, city, forest; of fish and wolf and bug and man; of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen—it has come unbalanced in our short moment on it. It’s mostly us now.

And since it’s mostly us, we better finally think about who the hell we are. In 1989, with the solipsism of someone in his mid-twenties, I focused on individual human efforts—smaller families, reduced consumption, and so on. I still think these are important, but I’ve come to think that equally important changes lie elsewhere: in the direction of stronger, tighter communities.

To understand why, consider one set of statistics: the average western European uses about half as much energy as the average American. This is not because they’re living austere lives or dwelling in caves: as travelers know, life in Paris or Amsterdam or Oslo is as elegant and dignified as anything America has to offer. Nor is it because they possess some miracle technology. Instead it’s because they order their lives differently, placing less emphasis on the individual and more on the community. Hence, their taxes support vibrant cities that attract citizens instead of repelling them into the surrounding suburban sprawl. Hence, they are willing to use public transit instead of insisting on taking their own vehicles everywhere they go. And so on. That 50 percent is a big number. It offers some hope—if we can head in that direction, and get the Chinese and the Indians pointed there too, then perhaps climate change can be kept from spinning completely out of control. But it won’t be easy. Perhaps the most important summation of American thinking came a couple of years after I wrote The End of Nature. The elder President Bush was facing a reelection battle against Bill Clinton, and so advisers persuaded him to attend the world environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, possibly the most optimistic moment in recent history. Before he went, however, he told a press conference that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation.” If that’s true, if we can’t imagine living any differently, then all else is mere commentary.

Our recalcitrance won’t last forever, of course. Sooner or later events will break through even our carefully buttressed denial. (This fall has seen a spike in gas prices, and that’s been enough to break our love affair with SUVs. But if higher oil prices also lead us to increase our use of coal, in the long run it will hurt, not help, our global warming efforts.) That breakthrough, however, needs to come sooner rather than later. The science has grown steadily more alarming in the last seventeen years—some of the data outlined in the pages that follow has been superseded, but in every case by even scarier numbers. And now the planet is starting to warp in the way that researchers predicted. Time grows short; the need grows desperate. People ask me sometimes if I would change anything in this book were I to write it again. And of course I would—there are passages that are the work of a much younger man. Some of them make me wince. But the only thing I would really change, if I could, are the facts. I’ve spent every day since its publication praying that this book would be proved wrong. Those prayers have not been answered.

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