The one-sentence summary

Our relationship with nature has changed irrevocably.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • This book, first published in 1989, is regarded as a classic in the world of environmental thought. It was one of the first to articulate early warnings about climate for a broad audience.
  • In 1957, the scientists Revelle and Suess published a paper that showed that most of the carbon dioxide pumped into the air would stay in the air and warm the planet. They concluded that ‘human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past, nor be repeated in the future.’
  • While the story gradually built to include the depletion of the ozone layer, acid rain, and genetic engineering, the story of the end of nature begins with this greenhouse experiment and what will happen to the weather.
  • In 1988, the American drought caused the senate committee on Energy and Natural Resources to hold a hearing on the greenhouse effect. The main witness was Dr. James Hansen who ran the NASA computer programs that predicted weather patterns. He stated emphatically that there was now only a 1% chance that the temperature increases seen in the last few years were accidental. He told the hearing: ‘It’s time to stop waffling so much. It’s time to say the earth is getting warmer.’
  • Since then, nothing has been done, partly because the people doing the polluting are removed from the pollution as the wind carries emissions thousands of miles and turns the problem into a global rather than local one.
  • An idea or relationship can go extinct just like an animal or plant. The idea in this case is ‘nature’. It is the end of nature because the temperature and rainfall are no longer entirely the work of some separate uncivilizable force, but are in part a product of our habits, economies and ways of life. We have ended the thing that has defined nature for us – its separation from human society.
  • The idea of wildness has outlasted the exploration of the entire globe. In our minds nature suffers from a terrible case of acne or skin cancer but our faith in its essential strength remains, for the damage always seems local.
  • The greenhouse effect is an apter name than those who coined it imagined. The analogy is accurate because the carbon dioxide and gases act like a glass on a greenhouse, but it’s more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once bloomed a sweet and wild garden.
  • The defiant reflex occurs when humans insist that they can turn the working of all living things on earth to their own particular advantage, through technology, genetic engineering and so on. Shallow ecology accepts an anthropocentric world view of the industrial state and wants merely to reform it, while deep ecology asks harder questions such as: Where are we from? What is our relationship with the rest of the world? and Are we really at the apex of evolution? Many reject this because they believe it shows a deep insensitivity to human suffering, but sadly, the momentum behind our impulse to control nature may be too strong to stop.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Thomas Midgley, a chemist at General Motors in the 1930s, invented both chlorofluorocarbons and tetraethyl as a lead petrol additive, thus holding the record for the most banned substances produced by a single man.
  • Scientists first began to think seriously about CFCs in the early 70s, when the independent British scientist James Lovelock was the first to measure chemicals in the air. He is best known for formulating the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that the earth is a single living organism – a self-sustaining system that modifies its surroundings so as to ensure survival.
  • Science replaced God as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Scientists of the 50s waxed lyrical about Man’s Synthetic Future and predicted that most natural products such as wool and leather would simply be replaced. The author describes these people as glib polyester worshippers. He also predicted the sense of loss, grief and shame that people would feel when realizing that our separation from nature has been a mistake, and that much more should have been done.
  • Salt fronts occur when the ocean advances up a river, turning the water saline. In normal flow, the river pushes the ocean back, but droughts create a vacuum and the sea comes in. In extreme cases it can overwhelm freshwater sources so that salt water would overwhelm the water supply in taps.
  • Tragically, given that the author was writing in 1989, he says that if we now, today (ie. in 1989) we limit our numbers and our desires and ambitions, perhaps nature could someday resume its independent working, though not in our time, and not in the time of our children, or their children. And here we are 30-40 years later.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. It is both enlightening and depressing to read something 35 years later and conclude that, despite all the evidence, so little has been done.