from environmental apocalypse to modern-day peasants

Ronald Bailey's review in Reason of Bill McKibben's latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet...

According to McKibben, we are about to find ourselves living on a much less friendly planet he calls “Eaarth.” Why? Because the climate is about to get really freaky due to man-made global warming and we’re also about to run out of oil—the apocalypse, courtesy of Peak Temperature and Peak Oil combined. McKibben is no stranger to environmentalist jeremiads, having declared The End of Nature back in 1989 due to global warming and the rise of biotechnology. Twenty years later he’s declaring the end of civilization...

Eaarth follows the time-honored structure of environmentalist tracts, opening with a quick rehearsal of the science that allegedly seals our terrible fate, followed by a much longer disquisition outlining the author’s elaborate plan for salvation. But to give McKibben some credit; unlike many prior doomsters, such as Paul Ehrlich or climatologist Stephen Schneider, McKibben doesn’t argue for top-down centralized salvation. Instead he thinks that the situation is so dire that centralized solutions will fail and that we’ll have to return to living in villages and farms—to become 21st century peasants....