This is Bill McKibben's impassioned, groundbreaking account of how, by changing the earth's entire atmosphere, the weather and the most basic forces around us, 'we are ending nature'. This is an extract from The End of Nature, first published in 1989.
This book is part of Green Ideas, a series of twenty short books from Penguin Classics that brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth.
Bill McKibben (born1960) was one of the first writers to sound the alarm about climate change in the 1980s and ever since has been one of the world's most visible and effective environmental activists.