Falter
Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
Book - 2019
Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience.
Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben's experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We're at a bleak moment in human history -- and we'll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away.
Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.
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Add a CommentIt is another doomsday climate book. I think it is the best one so far. Bill McKibben writes about what has influenced the Republicans to think as they do about climate. Points out some bad things on horizon; I have not hear of. Offer one and maybe only one silver of hope out of the horror of the future. Travels to rural Africa with Silicon Valley types who plan to make a lot of money there. He sits on bench listing to a modern sale pitch to poor Africans. Small plastic bags of water are passed out. Everyone is excited and happy to get one. At first he doesn't get it, but then he realized the water in the bags has been cooled by solar panels.
You want to read a good horror story? Well this is it. Informative but mostly depressing. The one point I do not agree with Mr. McKibben on is that, while, yes the planet is suffering, it will in the end outlive the human race. We are the ones truly dying, and by our own hand no less. Earth -1 Humanity - 0 Done.
I found the book to be written with a bit of an agenda but overall I found it to be well done.
Above all, this is a very hopeful book.
McKibben wrote an early warning about global climate change with The End of Nature, thirty years ago. This book sounds a more dire warning. It makes for depressing but essential reading, and it does have a (slightly) hopeful final chapter. The research is impressive; the facts unassailable; and what he and the experts he quotes suggest are possible near-future conditions are sobering--even frightening. We think, what can I do? But look at the Swedish teen Greta Thunberg and what her school strikes have accomplished. From a single action by a single teen, a global movement has influenced politicians. This book is at least as important as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
So maybe we're done?