McKibben - Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

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For Koreti Tiumalu, 19752017and for the thousands of other beloved colleagues who fight so hard for the planets future

Thirty years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a wide audience on climate changeor, as we called it then, the greenhouse effect. As the title indicates, The End of Nature was not a cheerful book, and sadly its gloom has been vindicated. My basic point was that humans had so altered the planet that not an inch was beyond our reach, an idea that scientists underlined a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene.

This volume is bleak as wellin some ways bleaker, because more time has passed and we are deeper in the hole. It offers an account of how the climate crisis has progressed and of the new technological developments in fields such as artificial intelligence that also seem to me to threaten a human future. Put simply, between ecological destruction and technological hubris, the human experiment is now in question. The stakes feel very high, and the odds very long, and the trends very ominous. So, I have no doubt that there are other books that would offer readers a merrier literary experience.

I know, too, that this bleakness cuts against the current literary grain. Recent years have seen the publication of a dozen high-profile books and a hundred TED talks devoted to the idea that everything in the world is steadily improving. They share not only a format (endless series of graphs showing centuries of decreasing infant mortality or rising income) but also a tone of perplexed exasperation that any thinking person could perceive the present moment as dark. As Steven Pinker, the author of the sanguine Enlightenment Now , explained, None of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become. People, he added, just seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp and kvetch.

Im grateful for those books because, among other things, they remind us precisely how much we have to lose if our civilizations do indeed falter. But the fact that living conditions have improved in our world over the last few hundred years offers no proof that we face a benign future. Thats because threats of a new order can ariseindeed, have now arisen. Just as a man or woman can grow in strength and size and wealth and intelligence for many years and then be struck down by some larger force (cancer, a bus), so, too, with civilizations. Andto kvetch and whine a little furtherbecause of the way power and wealth are currently distributed on our planet, I think were uniquely ill-prepared to cope with the emerging challenges. So far, were not coping with them.

Still, there is one sense in which I am less grim than in my younger days. This book ends with the conviction that resistance to these dangers is at least possible. Some of that conviction stems from human ingenuitywatching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily. And much of that conviction rests on events in my own life over the past few decades. Ive immersed myself in movements working for change, and I helped found a group, 350.org, that grew into the first planetwide climate campaign. Though we havent beaten the fossil fuel industry, weve organized demonstrations in every country on the globe save North Korea, and with our many colleagues around the world, weve won some battles. At the moment, were helping as friends and colleagues push hard for a Green New Deal in the United States and similar steps around the world. (This book is dedicated to one of my dearest colleagues in that fight, Koreti Tiumalu, who died much too early, in 2017.) Ive been to several jails, and to a thousand rallies, and along the way Ive come to believe that we have the tools to stand up to entrenched power.

Whether that entrenched power can actually be beaten in time I do not know. A writer doesnt owe a reader hopethe only obligation is honestybut I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didnt, I wouldnt have bothered writing what follows.

If you viewed Earth from far above (and for better or worse, this book will often take a high, wide perspective), roofs would probably be the first feature of human civilization youd notice. A descending alien would see many shapes, often corresponding to the local weather: A-frames for shedding snow, for instance. There are gambrel roofs, mansards, hipped and gabled roofs. Pagodas and other Asian temples often sport conical tops; Russian churches come with onion domes; Western churches sit beneath spires.

Palm leaves probably topped the earliest houses, but as humans began to grow grain in the Neolithic era, the leftover straw became a reliable roofing material. Some homes in Southern England have thatch roofs five hundred years old; new layers have been added over centuries till, in some cases, the roofs are seven feet thick. Though it is harder to find good stuff to work withthe introduction of short-stemmed wheat varieties and the widespread use of nitrogen fertilizer have weakened strawthatch is now growing more popular with rich Europeans looking for green roofs; in Germany, for instance, you can now get a degree as a journeyman specialist thatcher. But at least since the third century BC (perhaps beginning with Greek temples deemed valuable enough to protect from fire) humans have been tending toward hard roofs. Terra-cotta tiles spread rapidly around the Mediterranean and to Asia Minor; slate roofs became popular for their low maintenance; where trees are plentiful, wood shakes and slabs of bark work well. Given that the average human being currently resides in an urban slum, it is possible that corrugated iron shelters more sleepers than anything else.

Do you find this a little dull? Good. What I want to talk about is the human gamethe sum total of culture and commerce and politics; of religion and sport and social life; of dance and music; of dinner and art and cancer and sex and Instagram; of love and loss; of everything that comprises the experience of our species. But thats beyond my powers, at least till Im warmed up. So, Ive looked for the most mundane aspect of our civilization I can imagine. Almost no one thinks about her roof from one years end to another, not unless it springs a leak. Its a given. And so, it will illustrate my pointeven the common and boring roof demonstrates the complexity, the stability, and the reach of this human game.

Consider the asphalt shingle, which tops most homes in the West and is itself, doubtless, the dullest of all forms of roofing. The earliest examples date to 1901, and the first manufacturer was the H.M. Reynolds Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which sold its product under the slogan The Roof That Stays Is the Roof That Pays. Asphalt occurs naturally in a few places on Earththe tar sands of Alberta, for instance, are mostly bitumen, which is the geologists word for asphalt. But the asphalt used in shingles comes from the oil-refining process: its the stuff that still hasnt boiled at five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Vacuum distillation separates it from more valuable products such as gasoline, diesel, and naphtha; it then is stored and transported at high temperatures until it can be used, mostly for making roads. But some of it is diverted to the plants that make shingles, where manufacturers add granules of some mineral (slate, fly ash, mica) to improve durability. The CertainTeed Corporation, the worlds biggest shingle manufacturer, has produced a video showing what it rightly calls this underappreciated process at its plant in Oxford, North Carolina, one of sixty-one facilities it operates around the country. The video shows a ballet of pouring and dumping and conveying, as limestone arrives by rail car to be crushed and mixed with hot asphalt and then coated onto hundreds of thousands of miles of fiberglass mat. A thin mist of water is sprayed, and as it evaporates, the sheet cools, ready to be cut and then bundled onto pallets in a giant warehouse, to await distribution.