An Idea Can Go Extinct
- Jan 23
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★☆☆
An Idea Can Go Extinct, book number five in Penguin’s Green Ideas series, is an excerpt from Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, originally published in 1989. That was way back when “climate change” was “global warming,” but even then, there was already politicization around the issue; it scarcely resembled the hardline entrenchment, volatility, and outright self-sabotaging policymaking we see today. I’ve never read The End of Nature, so I can’t comment on its larger themes or in what other directions it travels, but I can say, as an essay, An Idea Can Go Extinct is a curious bit of eco-philosophizing that, I must admit, was easy to get caught up in.
On the surface, I am readymade for an essay like this, one in which nature and spiritualism are intertwined, as in spiritualism in nature or, if you prefer, nature as spiritualism, whether as mere reverence and awe for nature or an unyielding belief in animism as a guiding force in the universe. Wherever and whenever McKibben directs his energy there, I am his humble servant, his faithful parishioner. But that is not the point of this essay, nor, I suspect, the book at large: “The idea in this case is ‘nature,’ the separate and wild provenance, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died.” His point is that that nature no longer exists, the one untouched, untainted, and unspoiled by humans. But what is that nature? And what is nature outside the context of man’s relationship to it and interconnectedness with it?
While we might philosophize about nature (Emerson did so and did his level best to ruin it for me), nature itself is not some philosophical idea. And so, while that nature McKibben speaks of may be lost, nature itself is not. Again, what is that nature? The one without man impacting it whatsoever, or the one in which man has impacted it so severely that there is no place that impact can’t be seen, felt, or measured? The former hasn’t existed since before hominids. The latter is a more recent development, and of no small concern, especially given the Trump administration’s concerted efforts to let us run amok. McKibben seems to be talking about the latter, but he’s pining for the former, as if the only way to “save the environment” is to purge the earth of humans.
That would certainly do the job, but there is, really, no saving the environment. There is only saving ourselves, and our ability to live, not merely exist, on this planet. We are not doing a very good job at giving ourselves, and if not ourselves, our children or our children’s children, the best chance, or perhaps any chance, of securing that future. But, practically speaking, there is little point in thinking of nature as something apart from us. It is here, and we are here, and as our actions affect nature, nature’s actions affect us. The greater and farther-reaching our actions are, the greater and more consequential nature’s response has been.
We can, and we must, if we are to survive and thrive, do better at reducing our impact. “We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden,” McKibben concludes. We have, and, for good or for ill, there’s no going back to that idea of nature. There is only going forward, imagining and creating a new idea of nature, and our role in it. One that is, hopefully, more interconnected, more attuned, more reverent. One in which we are a partner, not an overlord. One in which we build each other up, not tear each other down (and, yes, I’m talking about people, too). I don’t exactly know how we get there, but I don’t think we get there by conceiving of man and nature as separate things, or by believing that we can save nature only by removing ourselves from the equation.
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