The Gary Null Blog

Excerpted from the book EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2010 by Bill McKibben. Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computer. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.