Eaarth Chapter One

       Eaarth, by Bill Mckibben, paints a very stark and little known present for we who inhabit Earth. The extra a explains that we are no longer living in a world that our ancestors waged wars against one another, today we wage war against our world and we have won, we have changed it entirely. A large part of the change is due to our perceived knowledge of progress and what that entails. Humans believe that to be successful is to get ahead, go higher, go bigger, climb the ladder, among many other metaphoric pieces of language that tell us the only way to go is up. This means that progress is linear and can only be made in strides going forward. Just this language in general shows us a linguistic viewpoint of how our culture is centered.
       Modernity has become a goal of almost every human being, to get ahead is to do things right. To get ahead is to have "[modern] medical science, information technology, modern cityscapes, and countless other aspects of our modern technology-intensive lifestyles" (30) such as large animal agriculture businesses. The main fuel for these modern artifacts is oil, a lot of it. Due to our ravenous hunger for more we have destroyed our environment and there is no going back but we can do things to slow the process.
       Another thing that surprised me was that the book did not mention animal agriculture and its affects on the environment. I know through a ton of research that this is the number one cause of climate change and it has many devastating consequences. This brings up the point of veganism, the largest thing you can do as an individual to help slow climate change. If you are a true environmentalist, I believe that veganism is a step in the right direction.