The End of Nature (Oct 2019)

[Rachel]

October is my favorite month and Bill McKibben is one of my favorite writers so let's do this thing!! The October book is The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. It was first published in 1989 and is one of the earliest books to be published about climate change for the general population. This book is timely for a lot of reasons - the Global Climate Strike just happened on 20 September with a record breaking 7.6 million people striking, making it the largest climate protest in history. And it was led by the brilliant youth on this planet who are facing an uncertain future. Also coming up in December is COP25 - the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference. So right now is an important time to do whatever we can to demand climate action. We only have a finite amount of time to act responsibly and quickly and that time is running out fast. So the first step, in my opinion, is being informed. So we're reading this book this month to start, and I'm really excited about that. Information and education are important aspects of life, in my opinion. And the second step is to get involved, and the author is also a founding member of 350.org, and I encourage you to check them out! I hope you'll read along with me!

[Rachel]

I finished the book, and here's my review/rant on climate change: I follow Bill McKibben on twitter and much of what he says there is also said in this book. Except now it's 30 years later and almost nothing has changed. He says near the end: "The choice of doing nothing - of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal - is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature." That was published in 1989 and yet I still feel like that's true today. We're continuing to burn oil and coal and somehow people are still fighting about IF climate change is real (it is) or IF they "believe" in it (except science isn't a belief system). Which is all absurd to me. It's long past the time where action should have begun yet we're still bickering over if we should do something, or the cost of doing something. The cost of NOT doing something outweighs it all. We do nothing and like Bill McKibben says - we go "if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature". As in, a future where the climate has changed and the earth is warmer and hotter and it's a future we've built for ourselves and are somehow slow to repair. I'm rambling a bit but the point is I think Bill McKibben laid out everything cleanly and with imperative in 1989 and the world still didn't change. 2019 is different, for sure - there's more green energy, more fuel efficient vehicles - but it's also the same. We have to demand climate action now. And it's heartening to see the younger generation below mine demanding that action, striking for the future, and being educated about the problem and speaking up.