Bill McKibben Adds to His Literary Eco-Arsenal With a New Book on Bioengineering

You can’t complain to Bill McKibben about an unseasonably cold spring. Fifteen years ago, at age 27, the former New Yorker writer launched an exhaustive investigation of global warming that convinced him humanity — more specifically, human ambition — was having a catastrophic effect on the Earth’s climate. The resulting best-seller, The End of Nature, was an eloquent, urgent call to environmental action. Translated into 20 languages, the book established the young Harvard alum as an eco-Cassandra, a prophet of civilization-changing dangers most people would rather not face.

“I’ve spent the intervening 15 years alternately being completely horrified that what I said what happening in fact was, and — true confession — feeling slightly vindicated with each passing horrible, hot year,” says 42-year-old McKibben, who is now a visiting scholar at Middlebury College.

His new book, Enough, calls attention to a threat even more insidious than a hole in the ozone layer. Subtitled Staying Human in an Engineered Age, the book examines technologies, particularly genetic manipulation, that have the potential to irrevocably alter our kind. McKibben passionately suggests that unless they’re restricted, advances which permit us to eliminate hereditary diseases like hemophilia and cystic fibrosis will also pave the way for a booming market in genetic “enhancements.” Parents will be able to “program” their kids not only to be healthy, but also happy, thin, smart — even musical, obedient or pious.

“What will you have done to your newborn when you have installed into the nucleus of every one of her billion cells a purchased code that will pump out proteins designed to change her?” he asks rhetorically in Enough. “You will have robbed her of the last possible chance of understanding her life.”

While McKibben thoroughly examines what it means to be mortal, he asserts that the alteration of human hard wiring amounts to a form of species suicide.

Like The End of Nature, Enough is an impassioned and well-researched warning about human domination. “Unlike global warming, though, this genie is not out of the bottle,” McKibben writes of human germline engineering, a procedure in which embryos can be customized. That fact justifies the title of the book, and its ultimate prescription of self-restraint. Arguing that we already live sufficiently long, and well, he writes, “We have reached a point of great comfort and ease relative to the past. The real question is whether, having reached that point, we want to trade it in for something essentially unknown … Is it possible to say enough?”

As a writer and thinker, McKibben is drawn to what he calls threshold issues — “things that are so big that if you step past a certain point everything changes” — and he is uniquely equipped to take them on. The son of a newspaper man, he has the reporting skills to decipher the science and the writing flair to make the results entertaining and understandable. Despite 21 pages of footnotes, Enough never feels academic. In a rare, immodest moment, McKibben concedes, “I’m pretty good at synthesizing a lot of stuff from a lot of places and seeing patterns in it.”

But it’s in the philosophy, psychology and theology departments which McKibben really excels. Not too many writers are chosen for inclusion in “best science” and “best spiritual” writing collections. McKibben’s willingness to pose what he calls “the deepest, juiciest” queries sets his books apart from straight science or nature essay. It’s not enough for him to introduce the inhabitants of a genetically engineered future — the clones, cyborgs, designer children and robots. He gets into their heads.

“This material really does force you to get deep into these questions of what it means to be a human being that for the most part we’ve written off: Who am I? Who are we? What are we about?” McKibben explains, acknowledging that Enough was more emotionally taxing to write than The End of Nature. “People discuss them as airy irrelevancies, but clearly they’re raised anew by these technologies in ways that demand we get back to thinking about them — quickly. It’s the largest questions considered in their largest way that tend somehow not to get tackled.”

You can trace the intellectual journey — and the personal evolution — of Bill McKibben through the books he’s written since The End of Nature. The Age of Missing Information (1992) is a meditation on the negative impact of television. Maybe One (1998) argues for one-child families — he and his wife, writer Sue Halpern, have a 10-year-old daughter. Long-Distance: The Year of Living Strenuously (2000) is the literary account of a mid-life crisis. It documents the painful process resulting from McKibben’s decision — approaching 40 — to get in the best shape of his life.

Enough reflects more mature concerns, such as parental control, mortality and what constitutes a good life. “I couldn’t have written this book when I was 27,” McKibben says. “My interaction with the natural world, the external world, had ripened to some degree by the time I was 27. But my interaction with the internal world had — only since being married, having a child, watching my father die — reached some level where I can think about these questions.”

In some ways, McKibben seems older than he is. A former high-school debater, he eschews slang for a more thoughtful, formal way of speaking. You can imagine him holding his own with “Mr. Shawn,” as he still refers to the former editor of The New Yorker, or planting crops alongside Amish farmers, an experience he recalls in Enough. Tall and lean, he comes across as a well-meaning square — modest, polite and earnest. He says he’s relieved to have missed the ’60s. You get the distinct impression he’s never inhaled.

McKibben was born in Palo Alto, California, but grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where “It never occurred to me that having an oppositional, contrary soul was all that unusual,” he says. His summer job was directing tourists to the historic town green, on which villagers had confronted the British in the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War. The site took on added symbolism during the Vietnam War, when John Kerry and a group of veterans petitioned the town for permission to protest there for a night. Their request was denied. “So hundreds of people in town, including my father, stayed all night with them and got arrested,” says McKibben. “That probably made an impression on me.”

So, apparently, did his father’s vocation — he was a business editor at The Boston Globe. McKibben was already a working journalist before he went to Harvard. There he found a place at the university’s hard-hitting daily — initially as a reporter covering Cambridge and, in his senior year, as the paper’s editor. “My major was theoretically political science — government, they call it there. But all I did there was work 14 hours a day on The Crimson, for four years.”

Some of the editor’s work found its way to William Shawn at The New Yorker magazine. He telephoned McKibben, who promptly hung up on him. “I thought it was someone teasing,” he says. Six months later, Shawn called again and offered McKibben a job.

McKibben came to The New Yorker at age 21 and stayed five years, during which he wrote approximately 400 anonymous “Talk of the Town” pieces. The research, which is archived in three binders in his Middlebury office, took him to strange places all over New York. Writing short and byline-free on all kinds of subjects was “liberating,” McKibben recalls. Although he was younger than everyone else on staff, he says, “it was the only place I’ve felt comfortable working.”

McKibben quit his job the Shawn was fired. Pretty soon he was doing longer pieces, with bylines, for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. Then his first book made him an instant celebrity in environmental science circles. He would have preferred a more activist response to The End of Nature. McKibben recently got himself arrested with the head of Greenpeace calling attention to global warming on Capitol Hill. He drives a hybrid car. “It’s been a good education. Even with all sorts of good people working on this problem, we’ve made essentially no progress — just because it’s so enormous.”

McKibben is attracted to uphill battles. Otherwise he wouldn’t take on topics like environmental degradation, rampant consumerism and loss of meaning in the modern world. By he isn’t all doom and gloom, as evidenced in his most optimistic book, Hope, Human and the Wild (1995), which looks at three locales around the globe that are bucking those trends. Among them are the Adirondacks — what McKibben calls the “white-hot center of ecological restoration in the world. It’s the one place in the world that has gone from brown to green in the last century.”

McKibben practices what he preaches. So in 1986, he and Halpern decided to move to the Adirondacks. The family left the bustle of Manhattan for the virtual isolation of Johnsburg, population 200. McKibben thrived, dividing his days between writing, time in the woods and civic involvement. He was treasurer of the Garnet Lake Fire Department and a Sunday school teacher at the Johnsburg United Methodist Church.

From that side of the lake, he confesses, Vermonters looked like Saab-driving, cappuccino-sipping yuppies. But when Middlebury College extended a visiting-scholar offer, McKibben and Halpern decided to see for themselves. They promptly fell in love with Addison County. “It’s like living in a Richard Scarry book — this little tiny compact area. You go from the spine of the Green Mountains, at like 3500 feet — down to sea level at Lake Champlain in 15, 16 miles. In between, there is every kind of ecosystem, there’s every kind of community.”

They settled in Ripton, which is almost wild enough to feel like the Adirondacks. Although he has no teaching duties at Middlebury, McKibben fits right in amidst boundary-breaking profs like John Elder, an environmentalist who currently chairs the English department. McKibben occupies Elder’s former, Adirondacks-facing office for the year. “It’s one of the reasons I came,” he says of the view.

The other was to write Enough, which has pretty much consumed him for the past three years. Two reviews turned up on the day of our interview. The Los Angeles Times raved; The New York Times Book Review was not convinced. But the date had a significance greater than the vicissitudes of literary criticism: It was the 50th anniversary of the published report in which James Watson and Francis Crick unveiled the structure of DNA. Just as the scientists who spit the atom failed to envision Hiroshima, Iraq or North Korea, no one imagined that better understanding life could so quickly come to threaten it.

When he wrote The End of Nature, McKibben devoted five or six pages to the advent of genetically modified organisms. “At the time, it seemed, compared to global warming, this was some ways off,” McKibben recalls. “Five years after that was published, half the corn and soybean fields in this country were planted with genetically modified organisms. There is not a product you can get in the supermarket, probably, that doesn’t have GMOs in it.”

The same exponential phenomenon is at work in human genetic engineering — McKibben compares it to the rapid development and public acceptance of computers and cell phones. What motivated Enough was knowing, as he puts it, that “altering the genome is essentially the end-point of the whole genomic revolution.”

He was also inspired —and alarmed — by a landmark article in Wired magazine authored by the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. After stating his techie credentials, Bill Joy suggested a veritable ban on human genetic research, advanced robotics and nanotechnology, the next step in miniaturization whereby atoms can be rearranged to create materials. Joy claimed that all three technologies present a clear and present danger to society because of their ability to self-replicate.

McKibben interprets Joy, “Tailored germs could spread; robots could build more of themselves,” and nanobots that could be deployed to do chores, or even create matter, could work up an appetite for oxygen or some other precious material upon which traditional life depends.

McKibben expands on that vision, imagining armies of invisible “assemblers” dusting the house, featherless chickens and mind-uploading. Every “advancement” is documented, and the anecdotes are great.

McKibben spent hours interviewing scientists for Enough, and they become interesting as characters. He tracked down Rael in Québec before the cult leader claimed to have produced the first human clone. He catches Watson making numerous eugenics-friendly comments, such as, “It’s not much fun being around dumb people,” and “When you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.” Another scientist, Robert Lanza, has a letter in the April 27 New York Times Book Review that claims McKibben misquoted him when he reported Lanza saying, “We’re close to being able to add 20 or 30 points to your baby’s IQ.”

Ultimately, though, McKibben goes much deeper. He is less interested in “how new technologies might physically overwhelm us than in about what it will mean to be human once we start doing these kinds of things.” To introduce this idea, he starts the book with a personal sports anecdote: his own experience running a marathon.

“No one needs to run in the twenty-first century. Running is an outlet for spirit, for finding out who you are, no more mandatory than art or music… Its significance depends on the limitations and wonders of our bodies as we have known them. Why would you sign up for a marathon if it was a test of the alterations some embryologist had made in you, and in a million others? If 3 hours and 20 minutes was your spec?”

McKibben uses the personal to get philosophical. And he draws from a deep well of knowledge to make all the connections he can, including references to myth, literature and popular culture. He pairs science and “Seinfeld,” reporting and activism. Noting some of the odd alliances that have formed around genetic engineering, McKibben suggests a political solution to the problem. A discussion, at the very least.

“If people actually sit down, think about this, and decide as a democracy that what we want to do is have engineered children, then OK. I think it’s the worst idea there ever was, but that will be all right. It’s that it might happen without that process of decision-making that is really sad for me to contemplate.”

McKibben admits that his findings can be dispiriting. Writing books helps. “It’s somewhat cathartic,” he concedes, “to unload it on everybody else.” He also finds comfort in physical exertion, especially outdoors. He ran the Boston Marathon on Monday. This summer he’s walking from Ripton to Johnsburg. “There’s something useful for me about being able to get out, often, into the woods. I just think it reminds me that the world is somewhat intact and going about its business.”

This unusually frigid winter, in particular, was encouraging — although McKibben doesn’t believe we’re likely to see too many more like it. “Today was the 122nd day of cross-country skiing for me,” he reports, as April snow begins to fall outside his open office window. He’s still happy to see the white stuff. “That means I skied one day in three this year. Even for me, that’s almost enough.”