Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings
about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human
game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out.
Bill McKibben's groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in
dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book
to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even
as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist,
new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to
bleach away the variety of human experience.
Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the
ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And
then, drawing on McKibben's experience in building 350.org, the first
truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some
possible ways out of the trap. We're at a bleak moment in human history
-- and we'll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization
our forebears built slip away.
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Falter* is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our
planet but also our humanity.