It’s a direct, attention-grabbing sprint through what we’ve done to the planet and ourselves, why we haven’t stopped it and what we can do about it. Determined to keep the words 'climate change' from fading into our 'mental furniture,' he has gathered the most vivid statistics, distilled history to its juiciest turns, and made the case as urgently and clearly as can be: The whole breadth of our existence—the 'human game'—is in jeopardy ... Reading this accrual of effects is like stepping back from a painting’s abstract swirl and seeing a fully formed world ... After instilling sufficient terror, McKibben cycles briskly through the intersecting forces that lie behind decades of inaction ... Despite the book’s bleakness, its most stirring takeaway is perhaps McKibben’s soulful insistence that choices remain.
... combines fear of bad outcomes with hope for good outcomes ... McKibben’s book is much more about grounds for fear, which take up some 18 chapters, than about grounds for hope, which take up five. Fear will motivate some people who are currently undecided, and increase the motivation of others already convinced. But in my experience most people need a strong dose of hope to be spurred to action. Why waste effort on a hopeless cause? ... In fact, there are reasons for hope besides those McKibben discusses ... It will take many different voices to persuade the world’s diverse citizens and corporations to collaborate on solving the world’s biggest problems. McKibben’s voice has been an influential one. My hope is that his new book will strengthen the motivation of those already sympathetic to his views. My fear is that it won’t convince many who remain hostile to them. I hope that my first prediction proves right, and that my second proves wrong.
... may depress and infuriate readers, but the founder of the anti-carbon campaign group 350.org still hopes in the end to motivate them to help turn, or at least slow, the tide of climate disaster.
The threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a 'game,' especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense ... When [McKibben] turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption ... McKibben’s book is breezy and rambling ... In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into...vague preaching ... The all-too-real possibility we must confront—and which...Bill McKibben notably refuse[s]—is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.
Bill McKibben identifies three specific threats to humanity: climate change, bioengineering and artificial intelligence. I heartily recommend his analysis of all three. His points about the implications of tampering with the human germ line, and his images of a planet filled with nothing but paper clips thanks to rogue AI, have haunted me for weeks ... McKibben avoids the trap of battering us with lists of terrifying facts that leave us reeling and unable to take them in. He has a charming writing style – inclusive, funny, intelligent and lucid. And he is a delightful companion on the journey – so delightful in fact that the terrifying nuggets are slipped in like a stiletto knife, in and out before you even notice. He accomplishes this in part with information that is quirkily distinctive ... personalizes and humanizes the raw facts with moving details.
...another lyrical masterpiece ... Falter reads like a book-length article in The New Yorker, which is not surprising since McKibben began his professional life there ... It is a humane and wise book, even a beautiful one, if that’s not oxymoronic, given its subject. Amply sourced and referenced for deeper study or for skeptics, it tracks the state of the natural world in exhaustive detail, and identifies the forces imperiling it ... McKibben has a knack for scare facts, all backed up by documentary evidence ... Hope being more motivating than despair, the book is a call to arms: 'Let’s be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let’s assume we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.' It is a lovely sentiment, but also a reminder that it is not only the climate change deniers who are anti-science ... Falter provides ample evidence that we are on the cusp of an avoidable disaster.
In his latest warmly engaging yet exacting chronicle of the damage caused by our reliance on fossil fuels, he exposes in appalling detail the lies and cover-ups orchestrated by carbon-industry executives and the political dominance of reckless billionaires who betray 'basic human solidarity.' In contrast, he documents the promise of solar energy. At his most provocative, McKibben shares unnerving concerns about helter-skelter, potentially ruinous deployments of artificial intelligence and the advent of bioengineered humans. Ultimately, his primary focus in this deeply caring, eloquently reasoned inquiry into environmental and techno-utopian threats is on how we are imperiling the 'human game'—that is, 'the entirety of our ceaseless activity' as individuals and societies. Profoundly compelling and enlightening, McKibben balances alarm with hope as he celebrates the climate-change resistance movement and 'the human love that works to feed the hungry . . . that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice, and of all else around us that is good.
Three decades after bringing news of climate change to a broad audience with the book The End of Nature, environmental scholar McKibben once again examines the impact of global warming in unsettling look at the prospects for human survival ... Readers open to inconvenient and sobering truths will find much to digest in McKibben’s eloquently unsparing treatise.
Offering ample evidence of the damage caused by climate change, the author feels certain that people around the world 'are not just highly concerned about global warming, but also willing to pay a price to solve it' by seeing their energy bills rise, with the money spent on clean energy programs ... McKibben is less persuasive in his analyses of the threats of artificial intelligence and gene editing, mainly because he gleans his information from newspaper and popular magazine articles rather than peer-reviewed scientific studies that would give his assertions more weight ... A compelling call for change that would benefit from stronger sources.
