IN THIS ISSUE:
• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
• QEW Mini-Grants help enhance relationship with Earth.
• QEW Annual Meeting & Gathering in Houston, Texas, Oct. 28-Nov. 1, 2010; Activist Tools for a Planet in Peril: the Case of Water.
• In a toxic chemical stew—what can Friends do?
• A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future.
• Quakers at 'Mother Earth' conference in Bolivia.
• 'Peak Oil' fishbowl at Cambridge Friends Meeting.
• Join FWCC's Consultation on Global Change.
• Register at 350.org for a '10/10/10' work party.
• Hitting bottom in the Gulf—a great gamble ends in a shamble.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Reviewed by Angela Manno

15th Street (N.Y.) Friends Meeting

After first learning about Bill McKibben's new book Eaarth, I avoided picking it up for aesthetic reasons. The Earth I know doesn't need another "a," thank you. The Earth I know is an integral, living system, maintaining its homeostasis to provide the maximum conditions for life to exist and flourish. The Earth I carry in my heart turns serenely on her axis in the blackness of space, as it journeys reliably around the sun, broadcasting her beauty in blue and white into the vast Universe.

And that is precisely McKibben's point: that Earth that we "know" is a memory. The one we actually live on is fast becoming unrecognizable through the loss of familiar features that we all associate with it: white ice caps, beloved species that evolved alongside humans, flowing rivers. The changes are so dramatic that the author has given this planet we live on another name.

Personally I don't think even this altered Earth needs a new name; to my mind she's an old lady, her systems failing due to a wild and profligate youth, or perhaps to torture, inflicted by the latest species she spawned—humans. As she continues to decline, we're going to have to accept that she's going to look and feel more and more like her sister Venus.

Eaarth begins with an unflinching look at current reality. The reader is immediately doused with cold statistics chronicling the radical changes rapidly occurring in Earth's processes and compositionfrom floods in McKibben's hometown in Vermont to droughts, soaring temperatures, desertification, deforestation, dislocation of populations, crop failures, species extinctions, and infectious diseases that are all on the rise around the globe. You'll find it all there in hundreds of examples, citations, and footnotes.

This is difficult reading, because what became abundantly clear to me is that the goal of "an Earth restored" is an illusion.

"No one is going to refreeze the Arctic for us, or restore the pH of the oceans." What's more, the rise of the carbon content in the atmospherealready 40 points above 350 ppm (which NASA's James Hansen and a growing number of climatologists consider the safe upper limit of CO2 in the atmosphere)has brought an end to the conditions that nursed our civilization into being (with the pre-industrial level being approximately 270 ppm). To make matters worse, bringing it back down, let alone stopping it from increasing, given our continued burning of fossil fuels, is unlikely.

Not only is it unlikely because of our orgiastic patterns of consumption, but because oil executives have decided where the future of Earth lies; Exxon Mobil has projected that solar, wind, and biofuels will account for a mere 2 percent of the world's energy supply by 2030, "while oil, gas and coal will represent 80 percent of the pie." Its CEO explains: "For the foreseeable future, and in my horizonthat is to the middle of the centurythe world will continue to rely dominantly on hydrocarbons to fuel its economy" (my italics). This illustrates just what kind of control these companies have exerted and what kind of control over the fate of Earth they expect as a matter of course.

Why the intransigence, you may ask, in the face of such an alarming prognosis and potential opportunity for profit? Because, McKibben explains, of one thing: sunk costs. Quoting journalist Paul Roberts, "'the existing fossil fuel infrastructure, from power plants and supertankers to oil furnaces and SUVs is worth at least $10 trillion and scheduled to operate anywhere from ten to fifty more years before its capital costs can be paid off. If we shut it down early, merely to save the planet, someone will have to eat the cost. Given such 'serious asset inertia,' no owner or investor in a power plant is likely to accept the writedown without a 'nasty political fight.'" That fight, he observes, already occurred decades ago, and we lost; the Clean Air Act would have required coal fired plants to install expensive scrubbers to prevent mercury and sulfur going into the airbut didn't.

For me, the most tragic of all is knowing unequivocally that we could have averted the disaster that now befalls us.

Forty years ago, as some of us remember, environmental consciousness had taken shape in the public awareness as pictures of the Earth from space were broadcast back to us; as if looking in a mirror, we saw ourselves as the tiny, fragile island of life adrift in the cosmos, incontestably finite, giving us the realization that there were quite simply limits to growth.

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