When Bill McKibben declared “The End of Nature,” in 1989, he was posing a hyperbolic kind of epistemological riddle: What do you call it, whatever it is, when forces of wilderness and weather, of animal kingdoms and plant life, have been so transformed by human activity they are no longer truly “natural”? The answer came a few decades later with the term “the Anthropocene,” which was coined in the spirit of environmental alarm and suggested a much messier and more unstable state than “end.”
