McKibbin,B. (1989) The End of Nature. New York: Random House. 226pp.

This essay continues my series of monthly posts in which I select one ‘climate’ book to highlight and review from one of the 44 years of my professional career in climate research (starting with 1984, my first year of academic employment).  The series will end in September 2027, the month in which I shall retire.  See here for more information about the rational for this series, and the criteria I have used in selecting my highlighted books.

This ‘1989 essay’ can be download as a pdf.

The world was changing in 1989.  Mikhail Gorbachev was the reforming President of the Soviet Union, the Tiananmen Square protests for greater freedom in China took place in the spring, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘the end of history?’ essay first appeared that summer, and by Christmas the Berlin Wall was down.  The START nuclear arms treaty was under negotiation between the USA and the USSR and the demise of the Soviet empire was less than two years away.  

Also in 1989, across the western world at least, there was a rising public consciousness of something called ‘the greenhouse effect’.  Time magazine’s first issue of the year declared the “endangered Earth” as planet of the year, John Elkington’s and Julia Hailes’ ‘The Green Consumer Guide’ was taking the western world by storm, and June’s elections to the Strasbourg Parliament resulted in a ‘Green Tide’ of European voters.  And in November, ministers from 68 countries attended the Ministerial Conference on Atmospheric Pollution and Climate Change in Nordwijk, Netherlands, which paved the way for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change three years later in Rio.

It was also the year that a young American journalist named Bill McKibbin, resident in the Adirondack Mountains of upper New York State, completed a book manuscript that was to have a profound effect on the way that climate change came to be thought about in environmental and educated circles in the western world.  It wasn’t quite, as McKibbin later claimed, “the first book for laymen on this topic”[1]: in the 1970s and 1980s scientists such as Steve Schneider and science journalists such as John Gribbin had got there before him.  But it was the first popular book that, rather than majoring on the science of a changing climate, explored the philosophical meaning of anthropogenic climate change.  For these reasons, my Climate Book of 1989 is Bill McKibbin’s ‘The End of Nature’, first published by Random House in New York in 1989, and the following year by Viking in London.

As McKibbin himself later recognised[2], timing is often everything in publishing.  ‘The End of Nature’ appeared in the interval between two seminal events in the emergence of climate change in the public consciousness: climate scientist Jim Hansen’s testimony about climate change to the US Congress in June 1988 and the launch of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in August 1990.  The year in between these two events was one of huge geopolitical significance, as I summarised above.  The Cold War ordering of world politics was collapsing and a new optimistic spirit of ‘can-do’ internationalism was in the air.  ‘It was a good time to be alive’.  I remember 1989 very well, having recently taken up a position as Senior Research Associate in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to work on a UK Government contract to evaluate the performance of global climate models.  My own copy of ‘The End of Nature’ is inscribed boldly with the words “Mike Hulme, Norwich, January 1990”.

‘The End of Nature’ was not really a book about (climate) science; for many, it became a foundational text about the meaning and significance of climate change.  Nevertheless, McKibbin was not shy of disclosing his debt to science and to scientists.  Several of the latter are listed in the acknowledgements as tutors that helped him understand the implications of their work: Jim Hansen, Roger Revelle, Steve Schneider, George Woodwell among them.  There are several pages in the book given over to a simple explanation of the greenhouse effect, acid rain and the ozone hole, that triumvirate of novel atmospheric phenomena from the 1980s.  And McKibbin presciently trails–in his own terms–the ideas of ‘the anthropocene’, nature-based solutions, and solar geoengineering, all of which are now common currency. 

If not a popular science book then, ‘The End of Nature’ was a philosophical exploration of the idea of anthropogenic climate change, tinged with romantic sentiment.  It was written very much in the tradition of American nineteenth century nature writers, such as Thoreau, Emerson and Muir.  Anthropogenic climate change had brought about the end of “a certain set of human ideas about the world” (p.7), says McKibbin, such that “a child born now will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter or spring …. we live in a post-natural world” (p.55).  McKibbin hankers after the mysteries of nature, of a time and a place where “rain had an independent and mysterious existence” (p.83), a pure Eden.  He laments the new unnatural climate that humans have made.  Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ in 1962 had unveiled the damaging effects of chemical technologies on natural systems.  McKibbin in ‘The End of Nature’ was now doing two things.  He was arguing that human reach over the planet, and our imprint on it, is now forever—our fingerprints are everywhere, even in the skies.  And, second, as befitted a Methodist Christian, he was calling on us to “bow down and humble ourselves” (p.199) before a Creator God and to exercise the stewardship and care for the Earth, a task for which we had been made. 

Reading ‘The End of Nature’ again, 35 years later, I find McKibbin’s philosophy of nature contradictory.  At times he regards the dualist notion of “a world of man and a world of nature” (p.79)–that “in our modern minds nature and human society are separate things” (p.61)–to be a “comfort” and “an assurance”.  Losing the idea of a separate “primeval nature” is, according to McKibbin, “sadness at losing something that we’ve begun to fight for”.  As one early reviewer of the book remarked, according to McKibbin “humanity has effectively [and by implication, regretfully] cancelled its own conception of nature as wild”.[3] 

Yet at other times McKibbin sees this separation, this dualism, “was a mistake and … many of us realise it was a mistake” (p.79).  But if it was a mistake to think of nature as separate from man, then why lament the end of something that never was?  How can McKibbin lament that “having lost its separateness, nature loses its special power” (p.194).  He seems both to want nature to be separate from man—thereby retaining its “special power”–but also not to want nature to be separate.

This philosophical tension revealed in ‘The End of Nature’ is not new and it prefigures analysis by later writers about the human predicament, notably Bruno Latour in ‘We Have Never Been Modern’[4].  Latour points out that the “purification” (his word; otherwise read ‘separation’) of man from nature aspired to by modernity, and recognised by McKibbin, never in fact happened.  Rather, according to Latour, we (continue to) live in a world of entanglements and hybrids where there can be no ‘pure’ nature.  Our bodies (our genes) are not ‘natural’, nor are our forests, soils or lakes.  Neither, therefore, can our climate be natural, however much we might want it to be.  A similar line of reasoning was also powerfully developed a few years later by environmental historian Bill Cronon in his 1996 essay ‘The trouble with wilderness’[5].  For Cronon, any celebration of wilderness that imagines it as primordial nature, “reproduce[s] the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles”.

And then in a new century, just after a revised edition of ‘The End of Nature’ was published in 2003, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger challenged the US environmental movement with their 2004 explosive essay ‘The Death of Environmentalism’[6], which was an implicit attack on the elegiac view of the environment espoused by McKibbin.  This in turn led to the publication in 2015 of ‘An Ecomodernist Manifesto’[7], which argued, contra McKibbin, that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.  Mark Lynas took this line of thinking to its rhetorical endpoint: humans have become ‘The God Species’[8].  This was a status for ourselves McKibbin had already sorrowfully recognised in ‘The End of Nature’: “As a species we are as gods, our reach global …. we are now in charge, like it or not” (p.73).

But McKibbin didn’t like it then, in 1989, and still doesn’t; he is no ecomodernist.  In the final chapter of ‘The End of Nature’, a chapter titled ‘A Path of More Resistance’, McKibbin seeks a return to nature, with a roll-back of our technological impulse and, implicitly, an embrace of degrowth.  He wants to preserve nature as nature, to repair the damage done to climate, rather than recognise that the only way forward is an ever deeper entanglement of “the worlds of man and nature”.

McKibbin’s instinctive dualism disclosed in ‘The End of Nature’ comes across as strangely ‘modern’, to use Latour’s terminology.  But as Latour and Cronon both show, we never have been modern in this sense of securing a separation of ourselves from nature.  In ‘The End of Nature’, McKibbin refers to genetic engineering several times, as a symbol of the “second end of nature” (p.152), but the exploratory and creative impulse to manipulate genes is part of what it means to be human.  Thus the human creation of AI, robotics, gene therapies, new materials, and the world in an iPhone.  The reality is that our bodily, material and social worlds are being re-made monthly through new technologies, so why not our ecological and climatic worlds?  The more recent embrace of rewilding is pure artifice, no less than climatic engineering.  Nature co-evolves with humans.  There is no such thing as the “primeval nature” (p.81) that McKibbin wants to protect.  As Latour argued in a 2012 essay,[9] like Victor Frankenstein and his nameless creation, humans have to take responsibility for their monsters, rather than deny that they are created.

That ‘The End of Nature’ was a great success as a book is not in doubt: it was widely read and remains hugely influential.  It made a splash when published in the pivotal year 1989 and it set McKibbin on track to be one of the twenty-first century’s best known climate campaigners, for example initiating the climate movement 350.org in 2008.  As well as a revised 2003 edition of ‘The End of Nature’, the book was reprinted in full in 2022 in Penguin’s ‘Modern Classics’ series–although with a different and more subtle cover design (see here) compared to the ‘planet on fire’ cover from 1989.

What was the appeal of ‘The End of Nature’?  McKibbin could be seen in some ways as a latter day Rachel Carson, 27 years after her ‘Silent Spring’ made its own impact on the environmental movement.  His prose was alluring, at times almost poetical, in a way that most other popular climate books weren’t (compare it, for example, with Boyle’s and Ardill’s ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ appearing the same year, which I summarise below).  In one of the book’s marketing blurbs, the English novelist Ruth Rendell praised McKibbin’s “mastery of prose and his love for the vanishing wild … This could be the ultimate in ‘green’ books.  It is certainly, in recent years, the best.” 

But part of the answer is that McKibbin was the first to offer a meaningful account of the significance of anthropogenic climate change, beyond a simple factual account of climate science.  At the precise time that the political world was profoundly changing, American environmentalism had found a new voice for a new cause.  Facts do not speak for themselves, they do not disclose their meaning, and on the cusp of the 1990s decade, in ‘The End of Nature’ McKibbin offered a philosophical reading of climate change suited for a new world emerging in a new decade.

Yet in my view, and of course with hindsight, ‘The End of Nature’ turned out to be an unhelpful intervention for the public framing of climate change.  Rather than confronting the realities of ‘never having been modern’ and that ‘wilderness doesn’t exist’, McKibbin’s philosophy of anthropogenic climate change promoted a lament for a lost Eden[10], a desire to attain the unattainable, to purify the world’s climate.  The marketing summary on the original dust jacket of ‘The End of Nature’ offered a false choice, between “using science and technology to make a new creation, a synthetic Eden”, or else abandoning human pride and ingenuity and “acknowledge our obligations”.  Edward Hoyt, in his review of the book in the summer of 1990, discerned a similar binary choice McKibbin puts forward: “a campaign to control the rate of climate change and adapt to it”, or a “reworking current modes of consumption and production to achieve the same standards of living more efficiently”[11].  McKibbin clearly goes for the latter.

But this is a false choice.  What anthropogenic climate change surely teaches is that we have to embrace both options, to accept that nature did not end with climate change in 1989 but is in a state of continual remaking, of which human agency is an inescapable part.  Call it ‘the anthropocene’ or call it being ecomodern, but do not regret the passing of something that never was.

© Mike Hulme, July 2024

Other significant climate books published in 1989

Boyle,S. and Ardill,J. (1989) The Greenhouse Effect. A Practical Guide to the World’s Changing Climate. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 298pp.

The end of the 1980s decade saw a growing number of books about climate change – or ‘the greenhouse effect’ – written for general lay audiences (McKibbin’s ‘The End of Nature’ was certainly not the first).  One of these was ’The Greenhouse Effect. A Practical Guide to the World’s Changing Climate’, written by Stuart Boyle, director of the UK’s Association for the Conservation of Energy, and John Ardill, environment correspondent at The Guardian newspaper.  Typical of such books at this time (contra McKibbin’s ‘The End of Nature’), Boyle and Ardill ran through the basic science of the greenhouse effect, some of the consequences of a warming world, the policy options and challenges of defusing the threat of global warming, and then a catalogue of practical steps individuals and governments could take.  Boyle’s and Ardill’s ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ exudes some of the optimism of the time–President George H W Bush is quoted from 1989 as committing himself to “integrating environmental considerations into all policy decisions”—whilst also giving an early outing to the ‘n years to save the planet’ meme through its urgent salvationist framing of the challenges ahead.

Mortimore,M. (1989) Adapting to Drought: Farmers, Famines, and Desertification in West Africa.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 299pp.

The severe drought in the Sahel of Africa in the early 1970s, recurring with greater intensity in Ethiopia and Sudan a decade later, was a significant prompt that elevated awareness amongst scientists and wider audiences in the 1970s and 1980s of the impacts of climatic variability on human societies.  But societies are not passive in the face of climatic threats, as was persuasively demonstrated in Mortimore’s, ‘Adapting to Drought: Farmers, Famines, and Desertification in West Africa’.  British geographer Michael Mortimore (1937-2017) had lived and worked for over a quarter century in northern Nigeria, and this book is both an early, and a powerful, defence of the view that disadvantaged African smallholders ‘adapt’ more or less successfully to severe climatic drought, rather than submitting to it.  Well before terms such as ‘climate resilience’, ‘Indigenous knowledge holders’ and ‘grass-roots adaptation’ became central for the emerging field of climate vulnerability and adaptation studies, through close engagement, observation and analysis, Mortimore here pioneered the idea of ‘climate resilience’.  For this reason, in 1989 ‘Adapting to Drought’ was a significant contribution to the climate change literature.

[1] p.184 in: McKibbin,B. (2025) The emotional core of “The End of Nature”. Organisation & Environment. 18(2): 182-185.

[2] Ibid. p.184

[3] Lyon,T.J. (1990) ‘The End of Nature’ by Bill McKibbin. Western American Literature. 25(3): 263.

[4] Latour,B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. [translation by C Porter] New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 157pp.

[5] Cronon,W.B. (1996) The trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature. pp.69-90 in: Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. (ed.) Cronon,W.B., New York: W.W.Norton & Co.

[6] Shellenberger,M. and Nordhaus,T. (2004) The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World. California: The Breakthrough Institute. 37pp.  

[7] Breakthrough Institute (2015) An Ecomodernist Manifesto. 32pp.

[8] Lynas,M. (2011) The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans. London: The Fourth Estate. 288pp.

[9] Latour,B. (2012) Love your monsters. Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children. The Breakthrough Institute. 14 February 2012.

[10] See pp.342ff. in: Hulme,M. (2009) Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 393pp.

[11] p.443 in: Hoyt,D. (1990) ‘The End of Nature’ by Bill McKibbin. The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. 14(2): 441-445.