Full Citation: McKibben, Bill.  Eaarth:  Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.  New York:  Henry Holt and Company.  2010.

Bill McKibben's Eaarth has an extra "a" to drive home his point that we have irrevocably changed the planet we inhabit.  He argues that warnings about the need to prevent dire effects of climate change for our grandchildren are misplaced because they fail to recognize that the environmental crisis has occurred more quickly than anticipated.  It is already upon us.  Climate scientists were conservative in their original estimates that in order to avoid catastrophic changes, we must avoid 550 ppm (parts per million) CO2 in our atmosphere, and then 450 ppm.  James Hansen has recently revised the estimated crisis point to 350 ppm, and we are currently at 395 ppm.  Scientists underestimated the capacity of the small temperature change we have already experienced to wreak havoc upon a previously stable, more hospitable global environment.

The New Planet

How does McKibben know that we live on a different planet than our parents occupied?  We now understand more clearly the effects of the near 1 degree Celsius increase that has already occurred. 

For example, a December, 2008 NASA study reported that this single degree is enough to increase thunderstorms over the ocean by 45%.  A warmer atmosphere evaporates moisture from arid areas more rapidly, but also holds more moisture, causing more intense downpours when it does rain.  

Tropical climates have expanded to include an additional 8.5 million square miles, pushing arid subtopic regions further north and south.  New aridity has created a 40 million ton reduction in wheat, corn and barley yields worldwide. 

Global rainfall is increasing at 1.5% per decade, and our single degree Celsius increase has created a 6% increase in lightning strikes, which along with more arid conditions in dry areas, has led to record increases in forest fires.  Fires burn, on average, four times as long as they did a generation ago, pumping additional large quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.  Warmer temperatures have allowed destructive insects, such as the mountain pine beetle, to move further north and to higher elevations in the U.S. Rockies and Canada, where they have decimated enormous tracts of forest, further increasing fire risk.  The destruction from fire in dead forests is followed by mudslides and soil erosion. 

Melting in the Arctic has proceeded much faster than predicted.  By 2007, the Arctic ice cap was over a million square miles smaller than ever before recorded.  From 2003 to 2008, an area of ice on Greenland 10 times the size of Manhattan melted, and in 2008, the West Antarctic was losing ice 75% faster than a decade before.  The governments of the Maldives and the Pacific island nation of Kiribati have announced plans to buy land abroad in order to relocate their populations when rising sea levels make this necessary.  

From 1995-2008, frequency of hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic increased by 75% over the previous 13 year span, and the last 30 years have seen four times as many weather-related disasters as the first three quarters of the 20th century combined. 

The ocean has become more acidic than at any time in the past 800 years, and by 2009, the Pacific oyster industry was reporting an 80% mortality rate for oyster larvae.

Lack of sufficient money to meet the challenges ahead will be a major problem.  We have allowed the infrastructure in the U.S. to fall into serious disrepair, and as the recession softens, the price of oil will return to record highs.  But in addition, the new planet we’ve created will cost us more than we are accustomed to – much more.  Insurance companies estimate costs based on statistics from previous decades, but they are beginning to understand that the past is no longer a reliable guide for anticipating disasters in a warmer world.  In a world where hurricanes are more frequent and powerful, where droughts that used to be occasional have become permanent, where fires occur more often and burn longer, where rains are torrential and floods more common, and where disasters follow one another so frequently that companies are unable to recover their losses before another strikes, insurance companies will go broke and taxpayers will increasingly bear the brunt of costs for natural disasters.  And this is the new “developed” world. 

Things are much worse in poor countries.  In Bangladesh, for example, rising sea levels are pushing saltwater further inland, affecting croplands, and an impoverished population is now facing the spread of dengue fever, a deadly disease that has expanded into new regions.  A warmer climate has extended the range of Aedies aegypti, a particular species of mosquito that carries dengue fever, and reduced the size of the males, which in turn increases their feeding rate.  The entire system of river valleys in southern and eastern Asia will be threatened by loss of glacial melt from the Himalayas.  In 2008, the World Bank found that now 1.4 billion people are making less than $1.25.  This is 430 million more than previously estimated.  Dwindling water resources have already contributed significantly to conflicts such as Darfur.  Climate change will further deplete water and grain resources, creating more conflict.  A Pentagon sponsored report forecasts that, “As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.”

Solutions

McKibben argues that we have underestimated not only the pace of global warming, but also the magnitude of change it will require on our part.  The lack of remaining oil on our planet along with frenetic new energy demands by developing countries such as China will make it impossible to grow our way out of the climate crisis through technological innovation.  If we turn to increased reliance on coal for our energy needs, this will guarantee inability to draw CO2 levels back down to 350 ppm, and “clean coal,” as well as nuclear options, will be too expensive to solve our emissions problem.  Environmental advocates such as Al Gore and Thomas Friedman are underestimating the expense involved in converting a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable energy economy.   Renewable sources will indeed expand rapidly, but because effects of climate change are happening more quickly and dramatically than anticipated, we will not have enough time or money to save ourselves through such projects as massive smart grids that transport renewable energy where it is needed.  To illustrate, if we built four times as many windmills as in 2007 every year for the next 40 years, that would still only solve about one ninth of the global warming problem. 

According to McKibben, the magnitude of the climate crisis will require that we undergo a fundamental shift in attitude.  We will need to give up our assumption that economic growth is necessary or inevitable and adopt a new goal of durability.  The environmental challenge will demand that we set our sights on hunkering down, learning how to endure.

This means thinking of solutions and lifestyle changes on a smaller, local level.  Decentralized solutions are less susceptible to the hazards of tightly interconnected global systems.  We have become so dependent on international institutions that failure of a few big banks can bring down the global economy, and failure of an international energy supply could do the same.  Similarly, failure of an international grain market can bring worldwide hunger.  In McKibben’s view, “too big to fail” is by definition too big, and the resilience that the new planet demands will be best met through a constellation of local communities that have become relatively independent in meeting their own needs for food and energy.

Our modern agricultural methods use four hundred gallons of oil each year to feed the average American, without including energy used to package, refrigerate or cook the food.  Some estimate that every third or fourth person on earth is now dependent for his food upon the use of natural gas to produce fertilizer.  Modern agriculture employs ever-fewer farmers who use sophisticated mechanized equipment, genetically modified seeds, and large amounts of agrochemicals to cultivate large tracts of land.  Many assume that without these methods, we would be unable to feed the world’s growing population.  McKibben takes issue with that assumption.

Recent research on non-conventional agriculture has discovered that a host of organic methods can be used to dramatically raise productivity on small farms.  By intercropping, growing alternative crops between rows, small farmers can double their output.  Peasants women in the Himalayas have learned to grow millet, amaranth, pigeon pea, black gram, horse gram, soybean, rice beans, cowpea, and finger millet in mixtures and rotations that produce yields six times as high as those produced on an equivalent plot of industrially farmed rice.  Indonesian farmers have learned that using natural predatory bugs rather than pesticide to control destructive insects allows them to grow fish among their rice paddies, adding nutrients to the soil and producing an additional seven hundred kilograms of fish per hectare of cropland.  East African maize farmers have improved soil fertility by adding nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs to their fields, which also provide a source of firewood.  Farmers in Honduras have learned that a new velvet-bean crop adds fertile topsoil when it rots, tripling or quadrupling their yields.  British scientists have helped Kenyans to control pests through semiochemicals that attract and repel insects.  They plant some grasses that attract parasites that feed on corn borers and other grasses that repel the borers.  McKibben describes a particular farm in Bangladesh that grew dozens of fruits, vegetables, and spices, as well as ducklings, chickens and fish that produced not only protein, but also fertilizer for plants.  The farmer claimed that, "food is everywhere, and in twelve hours it will double."  The variety in this example illustrates one of McKibben's central points - that these local farms are far better equipped to provide the endurance our new planet demands.  Loss of particular varieties to disease or changing weather patterns will not bring the entire food chain down if we develop local variation.  Constant experimentation and diversification at the local level produces a food supply far more resilient than can be achieved through industrial mono-cropping.

It is true that such local farming is much more labor intensive, which raises costs.  However, McKibben believes that if we shift our political resources away from industrial agriculture toward greater support for local farming, and cut out the middlemen currently involved in transporting, storing, packaging, and advertising supermarket food, local farming can become economically viable.  At any rate, dwindling energy resources and environmental pressures will make a shift away from industrial farming necessary.

As with agriculture, large, centrally controlled energy sources are more vulnerable and less resilient than widely dispersed, relatively independent local sources.  A Pentagon study concluded that in a single night, a few people could cut-off natural gas from the eastern United States for an entire year. Moreover, transporting energy long distances is inefficient.   For example, although North Dakota clearly generates much more wind power than does Ohio, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that once the cost of building transmission lines and loss of electrical power from transporting it are taken into consideration, Ohio consumers could produce their own wind power more cheaply than if they received it from North Dakota.  Jim Harvey, the founder of the Alliance for Responsible Energy, claims that research demonstrates that we can get renewable energy up and running faster and cheaper by supporting local rooftop solar panels than a high transmission grid distributing renewable energy from centrally located sources.   However, the utilities are opposed to widely distributed power, which would force them to relinquish control over energy.

Assessment

McKibben has a different vision for confronting climate change than such influential voices as Al Gore, Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs.  He believes that even these bright, well-intentioned people have not yet grasped the magnitude of the challenge and the response that it demands.  McKibben has much less faith than they that a growing new green economy and innovative technologies will get us out of this mess.  He believes that too much damage has already been done, rendering  these solutions too slow and too expensive to be feasible.   McKibben and the others agree that we need a dramatic ramping up of energy conservation as a first step.  They all recommend government support for more sustainable, local farming methods and locally generated energy.  But McKibben goes further in arguing that our very assumption that the economy must grow will have to change in order to cope with shrinking resources and the pressure that economic development is placing on our environment.

The path he is recommending cuts across political ideological lines.  His mistrust of grand plans forged in Washington and call for greater support for local initiatives will strike a familiar chord with conservatives.  He even devotes a considerable portion of the book to a history of American roots in decentralized self reliance and opposition to a national bank and strong centralized government. 

But McKibben is not a conservative ideologue.  He recognizes that localism can degenerate into narrow parochial prejudice and irresponsible policy -  "Our National Projects weren't only about paving highways.  They were also about guaranteeing civil rights and setting aside wilderness areas, protecting free speech and endangered species.  Such advances would fare less well, at least in places, if we broke the country down into tiny slivers.  One imagines the Alaska Independence Party, for example, would drill for oil in every square inch of the tundra, caribou be damned."  Moreover, his suspicion of "big" extends to big business at least as much as big government.

He is recommending a selective, not wholesale, return to localism.  The internet, for example, will continue to provide an important and relatively low-energy resource of worldwide information and global connection.  However,  the essential activities of food and energy production, and the economic activity they support, should be returned largely to local communities.  This will mean buying more from local merchants and relying more on local banks.  It will mean living with less stuff - no more low, low prices from Wal-Mart.  But there is an upside as well.  We may rediscover that our social needs are better served through a local economy that requires us to communicate with, and depend more on, our neighbors.

From our present vantage point, it is very difficult to judge whether Friedman and Gore or McKibben knows best.  Should we make major investments in a national grid and technological innovation to drive a growing green economy, or should we focus our efforts on support for decentralized, organic farming and decent payments to homeowners for the electricity they generate from their rooftop solar panels?  Our planet is changing so rapidly in so many unprecedented ways and interacting with our global economy in such complex fashion that a multitude of outcomes are possible.  Conventional wisdom dictates that in view of such uncertainty, we put our eggs in multiple baskets - invest in multiple potential solutions.  But given the present political climate and the considerable influence that the fossil fuel, automobile and agribusiness industries continue to exercise, we will likely delay taking significant action of any kind at the federal level.  At least for the time being, whatever progress we make will be on the local or state levels, without a great deal of support from the U.S. Senate.