Eaarth, our new planet

Charles Maynard, author and founding Executive Director of Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, discusses Eaarth: making a life on a tough new planet by Bill McKibben. Twenty years ago, with his previous book The end of nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it “Eaarth.” (Recorded January 26, 2011)