Exploring the Possibility of Human Existence Reaching a Limit: Falter - Has the Human Game Reached its End?

Amazon Customer: As a longtime McKibben fan, I was expecting a detailed and informed discourse on the current state of climate activism, along with some words of wisdom about building movements. The book doesn't disappoint on that score.

But McKibben has also been paying close attention to the world of AI development, and here he interviews Ray Kurzweil, among others, about the goals and quite fantastical desires of tech bros. The book makes it abundantly clear that our future may likely be in the hands of a bunch of billionaire crazies, people who fundamentally dislike humanity and wish to deprive us of it. I, too, think AI may become very dangerous, but McKibben opened my eyes a bit farther on that score. Now I am pretty alarmed, actually, as I also remain about the climate crisis.

Another thread in the book is an exploration of the dangers posed to humanity by genetic engineering, particularly of fetuses. While I agree that public acceptance of such would be a tragic mistake (and McKibben is very convincing about this), I also believe the general public is more likely to object to it, which somewhat mitigates the danger.

With climate and AI, on the other hand, there has...

United States on Sep 03, 2023

R H Fenner: Bill McKibben's 'Falter' gives an outlook on the problems of the future that our children, and probably we ourselves, are going to wrestle with: global warming, AI, global inequality.
Bill McKibben is an excellent writer with a very wide and deep knowledge of his subject. His vision of the future is frightening but utterly perspicaceous and, unfortunately, highly credible. Having read Naomi Klein, Yuval Harari and David Wallace-Wells, I found McKibben's 'Falter' totally unputdownable. I wish it were compulsory reading among our anti-Green and neoliberal politicians.

Germany on Oct 05, 2021

Clara Valverde: Importante book on our future

United Kingdom on Feb 29, 2020

Hande Z: This book is not just about climate change although it begins with it. The believers and scientists can skip through the first chapter unless they wish to be reminded that it is not just the fact of change but the frightening scale of it. Carbon from the burning of fossil oil is the general problem, the greater and more acute problem arises from the ‘extra heat that we trap near the planet because the carbon dioxide we’ve spewed is equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima sized bombs everyday’. McKibben travels all around the world to study climate change. He ports first hand of the melting of the ice shelf of Greenland – raising sea levels that, as an example, the Marshall Islands which ‘are a meter or two above sea level, and already the “king tides” wash through living rooms and unearth graveyards’.

Why has this not raised an alarm sufficient for the appropriate response? McKibben explains that the mere blaming of economic inequality is not enough for it lets the real villains off the hook. He sets out to explain the ‘ideological energy’ that is running the show today. He explains in great detail how the American government is being run by the corporate hands...

Singapore on Nov 10, 2019

dAVID: A compassionate and reverential view of the brilliance of human ingenuity and intelligence which is failing to slow down and repair the only place known to have ever manifest life. Now is the time to make the choice towards irreversible suicide, or not. We cannot think about it anymore but must understand which choice we have made. Will we watch the death of our children and claim innocence?

Australia on Jun 07, 2019

sean s.: Bill McKibben is a founder of the leading environmental organization 350.org. He writes:

‘To walk the roads through even a corner of Alberta’s vast tar sands complex is to visit a kind of hell. This may be the largest industrial complex on our planet – the largest dam on Earth holds back one of the many vast settling ponds, where sludge from the mines combines with water and toxic chemicals in a black soup. Because any bird that landed on the filthy water would die, cannons fire day and night to scare them away. If you listen to the crack of the guns, and to the stories of the area’s original inhabitants, whose forest was ripped up for the mines, you understand that you are in a war zone. The army is mustered by the billionaires Charles and David Koch (the biggest lease holders in the tar sands) and ConocoPhillips and PetroChina and the rest. It is hideous, a vandalism of the natural and human world that can scarcely be imagined…

In 1978, one of Exxon’s senior scientists, James F. Black, spoke to a large pool of the company’s executives. Independent researchers, he said, estimated that a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration would increase...

Canada on Jun 05, 2019