This argument sounds innocent enough at first, but as McKibben realizes, it has problems. Part of what McKibben loves in nature is his house and his garden in the Adirondacks. He acknowledges that in the interests of the entire globe he might have to give up such space and energy-wasting luxuries.

And I may be hopelessly mired in anthropocentrism, but I find McKibben's argument a bit elitist. The people who would suffer most by a general cutback in technology are those who don't have a house in the mountains. Citizens of underdeveloped countries and America's own poor depend on technolgy as a means of providing food, as a gateway to better lives. Who is to be sacrificed so that the wealthy of today and tommorow can enjoy gardens?

There are no easy answers to the global warming problem, and McKibben knows it. And the problems inherent in his final arguments are far outweighed by superb writing.

McKibben wrote for The New Yorker for several years after leaving Harvard, and it shows. The End of Nature cultivates the quietly lyrical style that is the magazine's trademark. Nowhere is this background more evident than in the closing of the second chapter when McKibben explains why the "green-house effect" is an apt name for the global warming problem.

"We have built a greenhouse, a human creation," he writes, "where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."

This thought is central to The End of Nature, and it represents a highly unusual effort to look at all the ramifications of the global warming problem. Although its flaws are obvious, The End of Nature is as fresh as the endless stream of "end" theories is stale.