Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet
“Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with dark poles and belching volcanoes and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place. A different place. A different planet. It needs a new name: eaarth.”
McKibben paints a picture of what life will look like on an earth that’s undergoing the worst of climate change effects, a planet so altered from what we know now it might as well be a different planet: “Eaarth.” How will we repair our civilizations and protect ourselves from Eaarth—let alone drum up the money for such repairs and protections—when our economic system and its growth depend on the exhausted and degraded resources of a bygone Earth? McKibben argues for organizing in scaled-down decentralized communities (aka “Think Local”) that will be able to weather the storms we’ve made Eaarth throws at us. Eaarth’s solutions are focused more on how to cope with and mitigate the apocalypse than on averting it.