McKibben's "Challenge to Environmentalism"

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/daed.2008.137.2.5

                

McKibben opens his article about the degree of which we have impacted the environment with an analogy. The invisible line in war such as the nuclear bomb draws a whole new hand with which chaos can be wrought upon the land. The invisible line in environmentalism was crossed once people found out that our actions have changed weather patterns, dried forests, melted ice that has existed for centuries, and killed off or endangered hundreds of species. Attempts in the past have been made to fix this but have ultimately done very little in the grand scheme of things. Humanity’s search for wealth, resources, and power has crippled its ability to see the damage being done to their very home and it is almost too late. Even with McKibben’s suggested shift to an environment-based economy it would be tough to save the Earth, and that’s only if we could somehow convince everyone to do this. McKibben also blames the United States by saying, “(they’ve) eaten all of the world’s cake, and are now making it hard to put even bread on the table.” This highlights the problems that America’s consumer population has given to the world. But McKibben also points out that local farmers markets are a fast growing sector of the U.S. economy and believes that a shift back towards local and regional awareness will help to grow the environmentalist movement as well.