“Those ‘record highs’ and ‘record lows’ that the weathermen are always talking about– they’re meaningless now. It’s like comparing pole vaults between athletes using bamboo and those using fiberglass poles, or dash times between athletes who’ve been chewing steroids and those who’ve stuck to Wheaties. They imply a connection between the past and the present which doesn’t exist. The comparison is like hanging Rembrandts next to Warhols; we live in a postnatural world. Thoreau once said he could walk for half an hour and come to ‘some portion of the earth’s surface where man does not stand from one year’s end to an another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but the cigar-smoke of man.’ Now you could walk half a year and not reach such a spot. Politics –our particular way of life, our ideas about how we should live– now blows its smoke over every inch of the globe.” Bill Mckibben, The End of Nature (1988) Page 51.
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