More rational eco reasoning:
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But Bill McKibben has found a planet where such books sell well. It is a world where environmental news goes from bad to worse, a place where ice caps vanish, crops fail, oceans acidify, activists rally and an oil company makes more money in three years than any company in the history of money. The place McKibben has discovered is an unpronounceable land called Eaarth. Where is Eaarth, you may ask? Unfortunately, youre soaking in it.
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Earth with one a, according to Mc Kibben, no longer exists. We have carbonized it out of existence. Two-a Eaarth is now our home. On two-a Eaarth, we are way past the bearable threshold 350 parts per million for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and well down the road to a devastating 650 parts per million.
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we have come to resemble the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack, as McKibben puts it. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue. How we proceed with a half-dead heart is McKibbens primary concern, one that keeps even the morbidly pessimistic reader turning the pages, looking for his own not-too-hot cubbyhole on the superheated planet.
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Unlike many writers on environmental cataclysm, McKibben is actually a writer, and a very good one at that. He is smart enough to know that the reader needs a dark chuckle of a bone thrown at him now and then to keep plowing through the bad news.
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But many of these proposed solutions inadvertently resemble the list of things Christian Lander lampooned in his 2008 best seller Stuff White People Like: farmers markets, awareness, making you feel bad about not going outside, vegan/vegetarianism. Its not that these things arent important. But in the absence of some overarching authority, a kind of ecologically minded Lenin, they will remain hipster lifestyle choices rather than global game changers. Which I suppose in the end is part of McKibbens point. Eaarth itself will be that ecological Lenin, a harsh environmental dictator that will force us to bend to new rules.
