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Book Review: 'Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?' by Bill McKibben
By Jim Schley
click to enlarge Bill McKibben - COURTESY OF NANCIE BATTAGLIA

Courtesy Of Nancie Battaglia
Bill McKibben

Early in his writing career, recalls Bill McKibben in Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, he "spent a year tracing every pipe and cable that entered and exited my Greenwich Village apartment." For his 1992 book The Age of Missing Information, he recorded everything that came across 100 channels of cable TV during a single day, then compared watching all of that with spending a day in the woods near his home.

Needless to say, he is thorough.

McKibben's new Falter is concerned with what he calls "the human game ... 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." Characteristically, he begins by focusing on "the most mundane aspect of our civilization I can imagine": a roof.

In quick succession he considers where an asphalt shingle comes from, step by step, and invites the reader to "Marvel for a moment at the thousands of events that must synchronize for all this work ... the sheer amount of human organization..." By looking at the vast via the minuscule, McKibben places us in the midst of the modernity we've made, which is disrupting intricate equilibriums in the nonhuman world surrounding us.

Framed by the brief "Opening Note on Hope" and a contemplative epilogue, Falter has four parts: "The Size of the Board," "Leverage," "The Name of the Game" and "An Outside Chance." If McKibben had ended with part three, this would have been the scariest book this reviewer had ever read.

Yet clearly his aim isn't merely to scare. The Ripton resident, who has authored 17 previous books and hundreds of articles and essays, is essentially a teacher, currently the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College.
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Falter poses a question: Given that many people have understood the causes and consequences of global warming for 30 years, why have we let three decades slide by without decisive response? During this period, accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere and oceans accelerated, and we've had "twenty of the hottest years ever recorded." Meanwhile human beings, and especially those of us in the U.S., have "used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in all of human history that came before." And consider the speed: "Even during the dramatic moments at the end of the Permian Age, when most life went extinct, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere grew at perhaps one-thirtieth the current pace."

What explains near-total inaction? Inertia was a factor, McKibben shows, and society had other priorities, but he describes how democratic processes that might have responded were hijacked by shrewd distortion of evidence and by demagoguery.

Climate change is a major focus of the first part of Falter. It is an accessible, comprehensive and irrefutable compendium of news from that front, albeit news that may be superseded within months of publication.

McKibben then locates global warming within a matrix of other disruptions. His greatest contribution with this new book is to consider how overreliance on extractive and combustive fossil fuels is connected with the most egregious economic inequality in human history. He links both phenomena to two other areas of unprecedented risk-taking: bio-engineering to redesign and "improve" on nature; and rampant replacement of humans with artificial intelligence and automation.

In all four of these fields, coteries of "barons" (oil and coal magnates, Silicon Valley tech moguls, renegade experimentalists) benefit in the short term, maximizing personal advantage while jeopardizing our shared future.

As a diligent investigator, McKibben names names and follows the money, including a detailed chapter on the Koch brothers' maneuverings. But his exploration of how Americans squandered our 30-year opportunity to address the danger goes beyond data. Our crisis is cultural, and Falter aims a disinfecting light on the antidemocratic scorn shared by many of the leaders of our fastest-growing and most powerful industries, who believe that traditions of civil debate, legislative prudence and judicial circumspection are contemptibly inefficient.

Fast food tycoon and Trump insider Andy Puzder has effusive praise for robots, for example: They're "always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex, or race discrimination case."

Bizarre drug regimes and cryogenic preservation of brain matter for eventual uploading to the cyber cloud are symptoms of many of these tech-industry elitists' determination to elude or transcend human limitations. Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, told McKibben that he takes "about a hundred pills a day"; he has no intention of dying. Likewise, many of the tech entrepreneurs are now investing in space technologies, imagining an eventual abandonment of Earth for pristine colonies elsewhere.

A fascinating connection running through these encounters with the fossil-fuel and high-tech elite is the ongoing influence of Ayn Rand (1905–1982). Many readers will be astonished to learn of the breadth of her cultlike sway; her novels are still revered by such influential devotees as Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Clarence Thomas and the present resident of the White House. According to McKibben, the core of Rand's gospel is, "Government is bad. Selfishness is good. Watch out for yourself. Solidarity is a trap."

While he is an unapologetic partisan — he's cofounder of the activist environmental coalitions Step It Up and 350.org — McKibben isn't a polemicist like Rand. Falter is the work of one of America's most skillful long-form journalists. Like his younger self who traced all of those wires and pipes, McKibben takes on a herculean scope of research and an astounding synthesis of sources, reflected in 20 pages of endnotes.

Yet the voluminous citations never encumber the book's narrative pacing. Page by page, what's most unusual is the natural warmth of his first-person voice: loping in gait, assiduous and methodical but brisk in transitions, probing then reflective.

And there are many exclamation-mark moments. McKibben quotes venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who told New York magazine that in his ideal world, "You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes."

McKibben's previous book was a romp, the feisty satirical novel Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance. Falter, while more somber and severe, shares with its predecessor an uncannily entertaining way of combining information with interpretation and insight, often embodied in a story. Here is a writer who genuinely enjoys people, who loves spending time with scientists and innovators, and who — though he's thought longer and harder than almost anyone about the danger we're in — finds grounds for measured hope. Somehow he has survived with both knowledge and reverence for life.

The fourth part and the epilogue of Falter are rewards, as McKibben proceeds to examine two examples of what he calls "technologies of maturity and balance": solar energy and nonviolent change. These, he believes, especially if combined, could save humanity and our planet. While one might be tempted just to read the last quarter of the book, its impact is greater in light of the difficult truths that precede it.

"We are messy creatures," McKibben writes near the end, "often selfish, prone to short-sightedness, susceptible to greed ... And yet, most of us, most of the time, are pretty wonderful: funny, kind. Another name for human solidarity is love, and when I think about our world in its present form, that is what overwhelms me. The human love that works to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, the love that comes together in defense of sea turtles and sea ice ... The love that lets each of us see we're not the most important thing on earth, and makes us okay with that. The love that welcomes us, imperfect, into the world and surrounds us when we die."

FALTER by Bill McKibben is a new non-fiction work by the activist author of the more fanciful Radio Free Vermont. Thirty years after publishing The End of Nature about global warming, McKibben combines his long-standing concern about Earth's environment with apprehension about the increasing influence of technology (especially artificial intelligence and genetic engineering) in our lives. In FALTER he argues that "we're simply so big, and moving so fast, that every decision carries enormous risk." In the first section, Size of the Board, McKibben looks at ways that "privilege lies in obliviousness," how we have distanced ourselves from nature, and how we already have losses due to a changing climate (e.g., "winter doesn't reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we've always viscerally told time has begun to break down.") In a section titled Leverage, he looks at shifts in ideology involving profit-seeking and race-baiting, the short-term outlook and lack of human solidarity. His philosophical comments are interspersed with data and statistics (e.g., on establishing solar panels) and, thus, FALTER is a rather involved call to action. McKibben argues that "we have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless." He has "walked the talk" by founding the environmental organization 350.org and offers in his latest work an updated, but at times, meandering treatise which is both alarming and hopeful. Approximately ten percent of FALTER is devoted to notes and an index. FALTER received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly and appears in The Washington Post list of "40 new books that tell America's Story."

link in live post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/opinions/american-books/

To start off, this is the 4th book of McKibben's that I read this year, and all I've read. So far this one I've liked the least. Maybe I cherry picked better books? I don't know, but certainly after reading this one I'm not too inclined to run out and read more of his oeuvre.

This book feels like McKibben is just railing against us humans, and with some specifics towards certain people (current president, republicans, Koch brothers, etc.). Diatribe is what comes to mind. And there are tangents of other ways we as humans may be falling into not fully natural humans, with gene editing and potentially post-human with a blend of computer and biology. McKibben certainly will not go there, and desperately wishes we wouldn't.

The book isn't just about climate change, although that is a big part of the book. His solution is solar, about how much that makes sense. And it does, especially, and particularly in countries without all the energy infrastructure right now. But we need it in the modern west as well.

I do agree with McKibben's general outlook and what he is trying to do, but writing this book I don't think gets us any closer. There is serious doubt in my mind that the people whose minds need to change will read this book. Will people on the fence about climate change, pick up this book? Probably not. Yet, I'm still glad he wrote it.

McKibben has a way of being optimistic even when the outlook is grim. With this book I think he's turned a bit of a corner. Hopefully we, meaning in the west, and especially in the United States, will start to take this climate change more seriously and quickly change our ways. There isn't much time left. And that is perhaps why this book is so dire.

By no fault of the author, I found the book to be somewhat dense. I don't fault the author because perhaps this just wasn't the subject matter for me. I did learn a tremendous amount about climate change.

This book should be required reading for everyone—it is by turns sobering, infuriating and eye-opening and written throughout in clear, conversational (and even at times humorous) prose that manages to make a scientific study read like a page turner. Bill McKibben begins Falter with a survey of the symptoms of climate change that are currently threatening our planet; although I was familiar with these issues on some level already, he marshals so many frightening examples and statistics that the urgency of the situation hit me like never before. Part 2 is a look at how we got here (the infuriating part), detailing the missed opportunities and—more insidious—the deliberate misinformation and misdirection on the part of corporations and politicians that squandered 50 years during which we might have forestalled the devastating effects of climate change we are living with now.

McKibben then shifts from environmental threats to a discussion of more existential threats to our very humanity itself, such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence (AI). This turned out to be the most fascinating part of the book for me—I was particularly riveted by anecdotes from Silicon Valley that would be risible were they not so frightening. Having laid out the problems in the bulk of the book, McKibben injects a (muted) note of optimism with a final section of proposed solutions such as solar panels and non-violent political action.

As I said, everyone, regardless of their politics, should read this book (although I do wish McKibben had resisted a few political comments which—while I am in complete agreement—might alienate some readers). Not an easy topic, but a necessary discussion. Thank you to NetGalley and Henry Holt for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

America is being held hostage by a curmudgeonly few who insist there is no man-made climate change. Meanwhile, the vast majority of both citizens and scientists seethes. To that, Bill McKibben’s Falter proposes two solutions: solar panels everywhere, and forcing a cultural shift using nonviolent organizing. He doesn’t tackle the huge overpopulation issue, forcing gas and diesel vehicles off the road, mass extinctions, or even what to be aware of in the coming years. It is rather odd for an environmentalist’s book.

The first 200 pages all seem to be tangents. He talks at length about the invention of gene splicing, Ray Kurtzweil’s drugs, gene editing, inequality, artificial intelligence and libertarianism. And Ayn Rand. Lots of Ayn Rand. She keeps coming back, again and again, because of her religion of selfishness. It has spread to the political and commercial leadership of the country, and is a main cause for the country turning its back on climate change and pollution, he thinks.

There is a special emphasis on Silicon Valley’s obsession with beating death. McKibben finds all kinds of tech billionaires putting investment dollars and purchases in having themselves frozen, or their heads frozen, or just plain planning to be around forever. That Google’s investment arm is focusing on such efforts should rightly infuriate the world. The “Don’t Be Evil” gang is wasting its resources on inhuman self-preservation, not exactly improving the planet. Not that it can possibly succeed anyway, if the human race is decimated by climate change, which seems all but a sure bet. Much surer, at any rate, than finding a way to live forever on Earth.

Pulling salient environmental points out of Falter is not easy, but I’ve collected these:
-Everyone should slow down, take stock and make repairs. Consider where we want to be.
-Past history no longer applies to our future. We’re entering unknown territory, with no way out. The future is far from bright; it is totally uncertain.
-Business is so anti-government it had to dismiss climate change, because it would require strong action by government.
-A team of economists says there’s a 35% chance the UN’s worst case scenario is too optimistic
-The amount of heat prevented from leaving the Earth by all the CO2 is the equivalent of four Hiroshima atomic bombs - every second.
-Just 100 firms account for 70% of the world’s emissions
-We are now able to put some real numbers to climate change. There are several surprises, all of them negative. Oceans are heating faster, and acidifying more than models predicted. Ice melt is proceeding at several times the rate predicted. For example, the Greenland ice sheet is melting from below as well from above, as the underlying rock heats up.

It is only in the final 50 pages that McKibben swings into action on his opening premises. Solar will help immensely, if we would just deploy it. But it has two things going against it: the fossil fuel industry, which will be hurt by it and can find no profitability in it, and that it is mathematically impossible for solar and wind to replace much more than a fraction of our energy consumption (Though McKibben doesn’t point that out).

As for nonviolent actions, he talks about the first Earth Day in 1970, when, he says, 20 million came out in support. That was 10% of the population. Today, there are similar marches all over Europe in support of the Earth, but the USA is dormant, ruled by the minority.

The whole book is framed by what McKibben calls the human game. He looks at the effects of various factors by how much or little they might affect the human game. There are three great existential threats to the human game: nuclear war, destroying the ozone layer and climate change. Gene editing and artificial intelligence: a lot, space travel: not so much.

From all his cited factors, there is one glaring absence that quickly became obvious and was never explored. What we really need is a functioning democracy.

David Wineberg

Even though I admire Bill McKibben and am on board with his views on the environment, I found this book meandering and angry. The first part of the book on climate change - while accurate - I found depressing. The author then switches gears to rant against Ayn Rand and the Koch brothers. A further section discusses genetic engineering. While liberals may enjoy this book, it is not helpful in getting conservatives on board with fighting climate change.