The Nation has a nice overview of Bill McKibben’s writing, focusing on some of the tensions and evolution in his thought.

McKibben’s more recent writing (e.g. Deep Economy) has taken a turn away from the wilderness ethic and towards a focus on “durable communities” and responsible stewardship. Our technological prowess, it seems, will inevitably change the biosphere, so now the challenge is to learn to use our power responsibly. And yet, the solution isn’t just to find some sort of techno-fix for our problems, but to learn the possibilities of self-limitation:

Even though the content of McKibben’s recent work is fairly upbeat, a tragic sense looms, because on some level we’ve already lost. We’ve lost the wild–the pure, sovereign “nature” McKibben venerated. Yet, having mourned, he has adapted his ideals. He now seems to endorse the view that, as he writes in his introduction to the anthology, “the traditional American distinction between raped land and virgin land was unhealthy, and that therefore good stewardship–husbandry, to use the old term–was required.” At least in our time, this shift represents a kind of growing up. The love of the wild involves ecstasy and innocence, properties of youth. Accepting responsibility for our role as stewards is a reconciliation to our circumstances. The world apart from man is gone; the solution to the planet’s problems is going to have to come from the species that caused them.

To McKibben, stewardship is not a matter of further manipulating nature so as to extract carbon dioxide from the air and clear the way for the status quo. In The End of Nature, McKibben wrote that genetic engineering, while it might succeed in preserving a livable planet for humans, would represent nature’s final death throes. Today, “carbon-eating” genetically modified trees and crops appear to be on the horizon. McKibben doesn’t address these possibilities directly in his recent books. His silence suggests, at best, a lack of enthusiasm.

For McKibben retains his profound discomfort with unbridled human power. Reasonable people–even reasonable environmentalists–can disagree about, say, the ethics of exterminating black flies with a relatively benign pesticide. There is something adolescent, perhaps, about McKibben’s insistence on braving the flies. But the alternative–expecting the world to be retooled for our convenience–is the attitude of a toddler.

Many converts have come to the global warming cause, but most are rather like Christians motivated by fear of the Apocalypse. After all, you needn’t care about the trees or the whales or the polar bears to oppose global warming; you only need to care about yourself and your connection to the future. Of course, McKibben, too, wants passionately to avert catastrophe. But he knows that this may be at once too narrow and too ambitious a goal. On some level global warming is, to him, primarily a symptom of misguided priorities and insensitivity to the life surrounding us. Most of us root for the polar bears; we’d be very grateful to keep some semblance of the seasons, which have lent a backdrop of stability to our lives. But ultimately, we fear for ourselves, for our civilization and our grandchildren. If a technological deus ex machina could save us, we’d rejoice. Bill McKibben is looking for another kind of salvation.