This autumn, as we speed towards Copenhagen, an almost infinite number of words will be spilled about the environment, the atmosphere, the climate, the horror. I’m pretty much all in favour of this – last year, for instance, I edited a massive doorstop of an anthology called American Earth for the Library of America. It collected America’s single greatest literature – the stories of the encounter between people and nature – from Thoreau through Muir through Rachel Carson through the amazing bloom of contemporary environmental writers: Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams, the incomparable Wendell Berry. I’m proud to have played some small role in that flood of words myself: The End of Nature, when it came out in 1989, was the first book for a general audience about climate change, and since then I’ve gone on to write a dozen more.
But right now –this autumn, with much on the line – I’ve put my faith not in letters but in numbers. In digits, in Arabic numerals.
Read Bill McKibben’s article at the Guardian
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