Now reissued in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
One of the earliest warnings about climate change and one of environmentalism's lodestars
'Nature, we believe, takes forever. It moves with infinite slowness,' begins the first book to bring climate change to public attention.
Interweaving lyrical observations from his life in the Adirondack Mountains with insights from the emerging science, Bill McKibben sets out the central developments not only of the environmental crisis now facing us but also the terms of our response, from policy to the fundamental, philosophical shift in our relationship with the natural world which, he argues, could save us. A moving elegy to nature in its pristine, pre-human wildness, The End of Nature is both a milestone in environmental thought, indispensable to understanding how we arrived here.
"Part science and part poetry, a sensitive and provocative essay of alarm, a kind of song for the wild, a lament for its loss, and a plea for its restoration"
– Daniel J. Kevles, New York Review of Books
"Permeated with the immediacy of the Adirondack Mountains, the trees he can see from his window, the changing seasons, the wild creatures he encounters. An extraordinary book"
– Jonathon Porritt, Sunday Telegraph
"The fundamental book about the planetary change we are undergoing"
– Gaia Vince
"McKibben explores the philosophies and technologies that have brought us here, and he shows how final a crossing we have made"
– James Gleick
"McKibben was one of the first to write clearly about global warming his plea for us to adopt a simple life is still profound"
– Independent