The End of Nature

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.

Bill McKibben is a writer and environmental activist. His The End of Nature (1989) is considered the first book for a general audience about climate change. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize. He has campaigned on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. In recognition of his activism, a new species of woodland gnat - Megophthalmidia mckibbeni - was in 2014 named in his honour.