Buell and McKibben: Toxic Discourse

Toxic Discourse

Deep-ecologist Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature exemplifies many of the basic defining features found in Lawrence Buell’s chapter on “toxic discourse”. This essay will focus on two of those features and will show that McKibben’s piece is highly representative of both. From Writing for an Endangered World, Buell analyzes the nature of toxic discourse and the very recent, overwhelming evidence that seems to be backing it up. McKibben posits his own wisdom on the subject, and proves to be an excellent example of Buell’s sense of toxicity.

Defining Criteria:

• An expressed anxiety arising from the perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency.

o McKibben highlights this point by essentially calling out our very human history of exploiting the earth and our mass production of greenhouse gases. He sees polluting institutions such as American agriculture vis-à-vis American capitalism as nature’s death and dying.

“… The carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life­­­– in pursuit of warm houses and eternal economic growth and of agriculture so productive it would free most of us from farming– could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat… We have produced the carbon dioxide– we are ending nature” (McKibben, 719).

o He grieves no only for nature, but for us as well. Using the recent example of impure rainfall, McKibben uses this environmental phenomenon to weep for wilderness and humanity alike. He reflects on how environmental woes can and will fuel mankind’s despair as well.

“Instead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, the rain had become a subset of human activity: a phenomenon like smog or commerce or noise… all things over which I had no control, either… And that was where the loneliness came from. There’s nothing except us. There’s no such thing as nature anymore…” (McKibben 722).

• Vocal, intense, pandemic, and recently (late 20^th century) very evidentially grounded.

o McKibben’s lamenting statements “assume a pre-existing, pure, pristine, and stable ecology prior to human pollution, especially carbon dioxide” (Rouzie, essay feedback). The deep-ecologist evidence he offers up comes from a pseudo-scientific observation by McKibben as he wanders through the woods. Is he still evidentially grounded in his observations, even though they are largely perspective-based? Since McKibben also criticizes the power structures that privilege corporate economic agendas over environmental ones, his remarks can also be tied to a social-ecologist perspective as well.

“As I walked in the autumn woods I saw a lot of sick trees. With the conifers, I suspected acid rain. (At least I have the luxury of only suspecting; in too many places, they know). And so who walked with me in the woods? Well, there were the presidents of the Midwest utilities who kept explaining why they had to burn coal to make electricity (cheaper, fiduciary responsibility, no proof it kills trees)” (McKibben, 723).

o Another example of this sweeping “vocal” and “intense” rhetoric can be found in the last paragraph of The End of Nature. McKibben takes Buell’s assertion of the intense human-ness of global warming, and explains the philosophical side of “the greenhouse effect”.

“The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse– the analogy is accurate. But it’s more than that. We have built a greenhouse, a human creation, where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden” (McKibben, 724).