Fantastic and highly recommended. ( )

While to some extent I appreciate McKibben's work, and he can write fairly well, this book makes clear he isn't an environmentalist at all. Rather, he is a sort of humanist reformer working to reconcile human domination of the earth with the reality of global warming. ( )

I first met Bill at Slow Money in 2010 at Shelburne Farms at the Second Slow Money National Gathering. His reputation preceded him. My cousin was a UVM student, and had recently participated in some of the Step It Up actions prefacing the creation of 350.org. Over the next year, I bumped into Bill two more times—once at Warren Wilson, and once at the San Francisco Green Festival.

McKibben is a voracious reader. Pretty much every book I pick up has a thoughtful review plastered across it of his penning. He's a phenomenally versed intellectual, who is aware of what's going on in such areas as the local agriculture and local economies movement, but has chosen to pursue a single-minded objective via his 350.org platform.

The book reads as a personal reflection on Bill's shift from author to activist. He's sacrificed a lot with his grueling compassion. Half of the book is spent on the road, delivering mean stump speeches. The other half is about his relationship with a beekeeper in Vermont, and his love of a simpler, more grounded lifestyle. Of course, he has his hallmark catalogs of recent climate disasters. Increasingly, they become a way to mark the passage of time—2011, oh yeah, that was the year of Irene.

I will not a bit of incongruity I find in the beekeeping practices described. Although the beekeeper is fully chemical-free in his treatment of his bees, he still uses sugar water to feed his bees sometimes. I find practices like these to represent a breakdown in the integrity of such enterprises. Is it local food if it's supplemented by cane sugar grown in the tropics? Also, how do the bees feel about their beloved nectar being replaced by a commodity?

Although I've read many an article by Bill over the years, and have some of his books up on my shelves [I'm especially looking forward to "Deep Economy"], this is the first time I've read one of his books. I was pleasantly surprised by the humanity within. Sometimes I feel as though Bill has been consumed by his work to fight climate change, coming to a nadir in his piece in the New Republic, "We Need to Literally Declare War on Climate Change."

If you too find yourself hesitant to step into a new role in our times of strife—nationalism, racism, and climate change, to name a few—you may find this book useful and reassuring. Changing how we engage with the world is never easy, but such a shift can be quite fulfilling. ( )

I don't necessarily disagree with the author but (at least for me) McKibben failed in his goal to convince me to act. Whatever environmental issues we have, they are essentially beyond our control to change. Unless the author wants to eliminate a few billion people and abolish most modern technology, humans are going to continue changing the environment until we kill ourselves off; and then the Earth will slowly shift back to a pre-Industrial Revolution climate. ( )

If you like stories about bees and protests, then you will enjoy it. Certainly valuable for the discussion of global warming but I wasn't entirely enamored with the subject matter overall. ( )