The once impenetrable and mysterious Amazon basin is riddled with roads, power plants, gold mines, boom towns, cattle ranches, settlers' swiddens, and coca plantations. There are precious few places where man is merely a visitor and not an inhabitant: even the South Pole has a permanently occupied research station. Nowhere is the earth and its community of life unaffected by man. Everywhere man's works insidiously pervade, if they do not palpably dominate, the landscape. And once autonomous nature can only become more compromised by human technology as the greenhouse effect kicks in, followed by a higher sea level, changed weather patterns, hotter summers, milder winters, desiccated forests, enlarged deserts, irruptions of weedy fauna and flora, and impoverished ecosystems. There is a hole in the ozone over the Antarctic created by fugitive chlorofluorocarbons. In addition to such evident works of man as the trans-Alaska pipeline, the permafrost in the erstwhile arctic wilderness is everywhere contaminated with measurable traces of toxic chemicals-everything from DDT to PCBs. The forests, lakes, and streams of the Adirondacks, where McKibben lives, famously designated in 1885 by the New York state legislature to be "forever wild," are ubiquitously affected by acid rain. According to McKibben, one can no longer find any place on earth untrammeled by the works of man. The end of nature in the twentieth century seems to be a much more literal matter.
The death of God in the nineteenth century was the death of an idea. Once flourishing nature, he argues, has as such come to an end-and we are the terminators. Three years ago, Bill McKibben, with the dramatic flourish of a contemporary Nietzsche, proclaimed "the end of nature." His book by that title was serialized in the New Yorker magazine and went on to become a best seller. Nietzsche's mirthless character then declares that "God is dead" and says that we have murdered Him. In a notorious passage of The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche portrays a madman carrying a lantern in broad daylight and searching for God.
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