I hope it’s not too late to review Bill McKibben’s important new book Falter, just as I join him in hoping it’s not too late to save the world or the human race. The book came out in mid-April, and book reviews tend to come out at the same time as the books, and then no more is said. But Falter is a book about which it would be impossible to say too much.
Thirty years ago, McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first general-interest book about climate change, which he notes in his intro to Falter “was not a cheerful book, and sadly its gloom has been vindicated.” More than a dozen McKibben books later, Falter is an equally prescient work. In this one, he stresses the urgency of the moment regarding our current climate crisis and addresses a fresh threat to humankind now still mostly in the planning stage: that of genetically reconfiguring the species.
Once again, McKibben has positioned himself on the cutting edge of history, issuing a dire warning. His earlier warning, and that of many others, about how we are altering the climate in dangerous ways was mostly ignored and at times actively refuted. (More than half of all the greenhouse gases produced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution have occurred in the last thirty years, since The End of Nature was published.) His new call for caution before embarking down an irreversible pathway toward designer babies and the massive new inequities they will create, will likely be resisted as well. But Bill McKibben is no Cassandra. Millions of people share his concern for the future. And there is still time to act.
Once again, McKibben has positioned himself on the cutting edge of history, issuing a dire warning.
McKibben acknowledges that “because of the way power and wealth are currently distributed on our planet, I think we’re uniquely ill-prepared to cope with the emerging challenges. So far, we’re not coping with them.” So far, we’re faltering. But McKibben notes two positive developments: a worldwide movement in response to the ravages and deepening danger of climate change; and new solar technologies that make possible a mass weaning from fossil fuels.
The subtitle of Falter is a question: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? McKibben uses the “game” metaphor throughout—to denote the whole of human existence, or, as he wonderfully puts it, “the sum total of culture and commerce and politics; of religion and sport and social life; of dance and music; of dinner and art and cancer and sex and Instagram; of love and loss; of everything that comprises the experience of our species.”
Now the game is at risk from climate change, genetic engineering, and of course other threats, including thermonuclear war and biological and chemical weapons—subjects that, while not the focus of this book, fit its themes.
McKibben says what humankind has done to the planet “should fill us with awe”—as well as shock. We have, in the space of 200 years, unearthed and burned enough carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas to fundamentally alter the energy balance of the entire planet—that is, “the amount of the sun’s heat that is returned to space.”
Among the first to realize this looming danger were petroleum companies. But instead of addressing the problem, the companies buried the evidence and launched disinformation campaigns to allow those strong quarterly profits to keep on coming.
Now, people around the world, especially those least responsible for carbon emissions, are paying the price: record temperatures, violent weather, raging wildfires, biblical downpours, savage droughts, mass extinction, growing threats to human health, and the likelihood that millions if not billions of people will be displaced due to the ravages of heat and hunger.
How bad could it get? McKibben mentions a 2015 study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology warning that, by 2100, the world’s oceans might become hot enough to stop producing oxygen through photosynthesis. Given that the oceans produce two-thirds of the planet’s oxygen, this scenario would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
Children born today may by the end of their lifetimes be literally unable to breathe the air.
Here’s another cheerless fact: By 2100, another study predicts that “even under the most optimistic predictions for emission reductions,” half of the world’s population will be exposed to life-threatening temperatures for twenty days each year. The consequences for agriculture could be equally dire, with the only places on the planet capable of growing things being those without the topsoil needed to do so.
McKibben's latest book, published in April, takes on not just climate change but the decidedly dicey future of genetically modifying mankind.
In pondering the epic failure of political leaders to take climate change seriously, McKibben spends part of his book on Ayn Rand, who regarded selfishness as a virtue and exalted the individual over the collective. Her influence on thinkers from Alan Greenspan to Clarence Thomas to Paul Ryan has been profound. As Ray Dalio, one of Donald Trump’s billionaire confidants, has expressed, Rand’s books “pretty much capture the mindset” of the President and his minions: “This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies and it admires strong, can-do profit-makers”—like the oil execs who are to this day ruining the planet their grandchildren will inhabit.
Rand died in 1982, during the administration of Ronald Reagan, which was packed with her admirers, after allowing herself to be enrolled in two of the nation’s most socialistic programs, Medicare and Social Security. Her burial included a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign. Her legacy continues, and, for McKibben, represents the single greatest threat to the future of the species: the failure to recognize that we are all in this together.
“Setting us free from our fellow human beings is a profound mistake, because we haven’t in fact evolved into some new creature,” McKibben writes. Rather, human beings are social animals, and one of the things that makes us happiest and healthiest is when we connect with others. For instance, older adults who volunteer to help children read and write are statistically less prone to suffer memory loss. Or, as McKibben puts it, “the great personal terror for most of us, losing our sense of self, becomes less likely if we engage with others.”
What a concept. And integral to McKibben’s rendering of it is that, thank heavens, there is no need for us to evolve into some new creature.
Within the last few years, the development of a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR has made it possible, even easy and inexpensive, for humans to create new life with made-to-order characteristics, from hair color to height to intelligence. It is a prospect that McKibben views with horror.
Instead of a luck-of-the-draw child, we could have “a human built to spec, designed (that is, forced) to be a certain way. Her parents, sitting there in the clinic with their Visa card in hand, will make a series of choices that will then play out over her lifetime and, because those choices will be heritable, over her children’s lifetimes, and yea unto the generations. It is control of a kind tyrants can only dream about.”
There are many people, perhaps with copies of The Fountainhead at their bedside, who can’t wait for this to happen. But McKibben raises some troubling questions. Are we on the verge of creating a society in which the inequities of wealth are magnified by the capabilities of science? Will a child born in 2029 be at a serious competitive disadvantage to the newer models produced in 2034?
“Once substantial numbers of people engage in genetic engineering, it will become effectively mandatory,” McKibben writes. “Not by government diktat, but by the powerful forces of competition, as the possibility of improving your kids sets off a genetic arms race.”
McKibben references Julian Savulescu, a professor at the University of Oxford who “researches the ethics of various new or emerging technologies,” and who thinks it would be possible to genetically alter human beings to be better at combating climate change. This would be done by enhancing their “intelligence, impulse control, self-control—some level of empathy or ability to understand other people’s emotions, some willingness to make self-sacrificial decisions for other people.”
We don’t need a new kind of human in order to stop letting the Koch brothers call the shots.
McKibben rejects this idea, not just because children engineered today won’t be old enough to change the world until it’s too late but mostly because he refuses to regard the current model of human as fundamentally flawed. “The reason we don’t have a solution to climate change has less to do with the greed of the great unengineered unwashed than with the greed of the almost unbelievably small percentage of people at the top of the energy heap.” We don’t need a new kind of human in order to stop letting the Koch brothers call the shots.
Obviously, science should do what it can to seek cures for genetic disorders, a point McKibben fails to stress. His argument is that the species is good enough, and the risks of human genetic engineering are too great.
“The overarching goal,” he muses, “is to keep the human game going.” If we manage to falter, “through some combination of environmental destruction and technological usurpation, we prevent the hundreds of billions of perfectly interesting and amicable lives we could otherwise expect in the eons ahead.”
Yes, the stakes are that high. And making the right choices now is essential not just for our survival but for the preservation of our humanity. “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing,” McKibben muses. “That’s our superpower, even if we exercise it too rarely.”
The question is whether we will do so now.