New McKibben book disappoints

I just read Bill McKibben's latest book, Eaarth (New York: Times Books, 2010). How could I not? Barbara Kingsolver said that "nothing could be more important." Having just been roundly disappointed by James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia, I was expecting more from McKibben. Perhaps too much. But, after all, wasn't he behind 350.org? And wasn't he, unlike Lovelock, actually a writer?

I had borrowed both books from the library as part of a spate of reading I've done over the last few years. I'm looking for answers, and I suspect that I'm not alone. So many of us are way past the point of needing to be told that something is wrong, that climate change is real. We want someone to show us the way out of this mess. Especially after the excitement and inspiration of 350.org, followed by the dismal failure of Copenhagen, we want someone to tell us what to do.

McKibben does have a very important message in Eaarth. His message is that we are not talking about, as politicians aver, problems that our grandchildren will face, or even our children. We are talking about problems that we will face—are facing—right now.
As McKibben explains, it’s not just that we are harming the planet: we have already irreparably damaged the planet, so much so that it is a different place. "It needs a new name,” he writes. “Eaarth."(p. 2) We have already increased global temperatures. We have already acidified the ocean to the point that oyster larvae don't survive and coral reefs are disappearing. We have already melted the arctic ice and started to melt permafrost, releasing methane—a potent, you guessed it, greenhouse gas. We have already started the process of desertification in formerly-fecund parts of the tropics, not to mention Australia. We have already created the conditions that spawn dust storms in the West, torrential rain and flooding in the east, more and bigger hurricanes on the coasts, and a fire season in California that is 78 days longer than it used to be. We have already started feedback loops that are impossible to stop

"The earth that we knew—the only earth that we ever knew—is gone," McKibben writes (p. 27). And green energy isn't going to save us. We're starting too late, and the required retooling is too expensive.

Kingsolver was right; this is an important book. The book should be required reading for every elected representative in the country. But I disagree with Rebecca Solnit, another reviewer, who said that “Eaarth is an astonishingly important book that will knock you down and pick you up.” It will knock you down. But I can’t promise that it will pick you back up.

The first two chapters, “A New World,” and “High Tide,” were very well done (these are the ones that will knock you down). But something happened in the writing of the other two chapters, “Backing Off,” and “Lightly, Carefully, Gracefully.” McKibben started to write like a journalist. (Writers write because they love language; journalists write because they love the sound of their own voices.) He begins to write less like someone impassioned about a cause, and more like someone trying to sound trendy. He becomes overly fond of snappy sentences: "Mammals get smaller in the heat, and so should governments." (And the connection between them is . . . ?) He starts using attention-getting metaphors and turns of phrase that completely miss the mark. On page 125, he uses a Viagra-induced, four-hour erection as a metaphor for global warming, and says that we’ve failed to remember that "constant and unrelenting thrust is no longer necessary." I mean, really, Bill; is this the best you can do? He describes Tuscan towns in Italy as the source of "good-life porn." (p. 142) He makes arguments that don't flow from previous statements. And he neglects to make sure that he is consistent. For instance, on page 98 he derides Jared Diamond and Jim Kunstler for being part of a "collapse porn" genre: "people advising that you buy pistols or hoard gold," while in the next chapter he advises that we will need to localize, which includes "taking more responsibility not only for your food but for your defense," and alludes to the need to develop local militias.

There are some real disconnects in the second half of the book. In one passage, he worries that life in a localized post-carbon world might be, well, "dull." (p. 196) But don't worry, he enthuses, the Internet will save us from terminal boredom. So . . . we have just been told that there is probably no way to stop horrible things from happening to the planet and everyone living on it, and my biggest worry should be . . . boredom?

More and more often in the second half, my reading was interrupted by the increasing occurrence of lousy grammar and usage, or maybe just typos. I became mildly distracted at first, then irritated:
"Small gardens . . . sprung up everywhere." (p. 166)
In the Himalayas, "women peasants grown jhangora" (p. 167)
"a hundred species of fruit and vegetable grew . . ." (p. 170)
". . . there's some eggs, but there's some eggplant, too." (p. 170)

There's some eggs? I had to put the book down. Because I know "there's some" other books around here I could read that wouldn't be so damned annoying! Does Times Books have no editors?

And for someone who is a career writer, why does McKibben have so much trouble using appropriate words? He describes asking people to drive across the country to protest global warming as "weird." Well, it's not “weird”; it's inconsistent, antithetical, even. Call it what it is.

There are places where he hasn’t done his research, or hasn’t made his point clearly: it’s hard to tell which is the case. At one point he makes it sound as if double-dug beds are integral to high-productivity organic farming and freedom from hunger. (p. 171)

Occasionally he pulls statistics out of context: "It takes eleven times as much fossil fuel to raise a pound of animal protein as a pound of plant protein." (p. 177) This is obviously only true under certain management systems in each case.

Some of his sources are inappropriate. For data on the power required to run the Internet, he quotes a newspaper article—another journalist. How about an energy expert of some sort? Can you at least tell us what the journalist’s source was?

And later in the book, McKibben began dropping words and parts of sentences in an effort to sound, I don't know, maybe like a "regular guy." Why was it necessary to use so many grammatically incomplete sentences? Did he have some kind of word limit? I kept having to reread sentences to be sure of their meaning. And why did he have so much trouble using the word "that"? It would really clarify sentences such as these:
"Farm workers . . . marched for four days to demand the federal government somehow supply them with more water." (p. 156) How does one demand a government?
“. . . aiming for a local economy and community solid enough to survive on this new planet might edge us back toward societies ‘traditional’ in ways we don’t want.” (p. 205) My eye kept jumping back to “societies traditional.” Oh, societies that are traditional.

McKibben occasionally quotes people without telling you who they are, what he is quoting from, and why it is relevant. On page 205 he uses a quote from Kirkpatrick Sale to illustrate why localizing might be “stifling.” A glance at the note tells me the name of Sale’s book, but nothing more. A quick Internet search would have allowed him to say, “. . . writes Kirkpatrick Sale, writer, neo-Luddite, and secessionist activist,” providing context for Sale’s opinion. Didn't he learn how to cite at Harvard? All of it—the crappy grammar and usage, the blithe generalizations, the snappy jargon, the lack of rigor—undermined his credibility for me in the second half of the book, even knowing who he is and what he has done.

I have read articles by Bill McKibben that were very well-written. So I can only posit the following possibilities as to why this book, particularly the second half, is so sloppy:
>Times Books does have editors, and they told him he should try to sound trendy.
>He was in a hurry to meet a publishing deadline.
>His agent got too involved.
>He was trying to sound like the 22-year-olds to whom he dedicated his book.

At any rate, I finally forced myself to read the rest of the book. His 350.org effort, though unsuccessful, was impressive. He must have something really important to say.

I am sorry to report that McKibben, as he might write, is "long on problems but short on solutions." His answer? Scale back, and localize. I’m not saying that we don’t need to do this. And I’m not saying that it isn’t a good answer. It’s better than Lovelock’s. It’s just not a good enough answer, and he is far from the first person to offer it. And not enough of us will do it. Even McKibben admits that it’s not going to be enough. It is, however, all that anyone who cares can do.

He did finally use a perfectly appropriate word, on the last page. He wrote, "the momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can't be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage." Hideous, indeed. Nevertheless, he says, we must "keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit the damage." (p. 212) That's it, folks. There is no way out. That's the take-home message.

I don’t want to diminish the importance of Bill McKibben’s work. 350.org changed the conversation. It made 350 ppm part of the common parlance. Perhaps it is because of the energy he was able to galvanize in the lead-up to Copenhagen that I expected so much more out of this book. But I finished this book feeling that there is no hope whatsoever.

If you want solutions—unpalatable solutions, but solutions—if you want action, if you want to know what you can DO, read someone like Derrick Jensen, or Keith Farnish. If you want to stand in a circle and hold hands singing “Kumbaya” as loudly as you can while the planet burns, read Bill McKibben.