End of Nature

            The End of Nature…. Quite a foreboding title, isn’t it?

McKibben gives an expose of the North American wild, and how it has changed as the Old World came to inhabit the New World. Our author uses examples of varying scope to underscore his point that we, as humans, have altered nature. He mentions the disruptive noise of chainsaws while on quiet, solitary walks and the invasiveness of DDT. Both of which are reversible actions; stop cutting down trees in the poor man’s backyard and stop using DDT. In Mckibben’s mind, it appears humans did not mess things up too badly until we introduced CFC’s to the world and began pumping CO² into our atmosphere. In this instance, we did not just rob a forest of its trees or poison some animals, but we changed the weather. In doing so we contaminated the entirety of Earth.  “We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning.” To relate this claim to the context of our class, McKibben is saying that the biosphere and technosphere are inextricably overlapping and he seems fearful the technosphere will swallow the biosphere.

This reading was rather gloomy and left me wanting as a reader. McKibben laid out the problem at hand but seemed to offer little in terms of solutions aside from his envisioning of two possible worlds where nature (artificial, of course) still exists. His “humble world” seemed unworkable given human avarice and the “managed world” in which humans simply manipulated all aspects of the world seemed hollow.

McKibben presented us with a dynamic, global problem. Where does one even start? He seemed to deride ‘artificial’ nature, but isn’t that all we have? There is no use crying over spilt milk. While the “managed world” does indeed seem hollow, it seems to be the more feasible of the two worlds presented.

 Is it ethically worse for us as humans to kill our natural world, or to keep it alive through unnatural means?