McKibben's Strategy

I don’t know about everyone else, but I am finding McKibben’s writing very persuasive. My passions are aroused and I feel inflamed. He appealed to ethos, logos, and pathos very effectively. In The End of Nature, one of his main tools was the understatement. He repeatedly suggests that his figures are probably too conservative (and it turns out he was correct). He’ll suggest half a dozen possible catastrophic consequences of global warming, but then urge the reader to only focus on just one (ex: imagine a world of dead and dying trees). But of course, the idea of just one catastrophe is supposed to trouble the reader, and the thought of several more is intended to raise him into action. The call to action is even more prevalent in the more recent Eaarth, where he abandons the calmer rhetoric of The End of Nature. Instead, he wants the reader to feel desperate and alarmed at the havoc that humanity has already wreaked upon the Earth. As an activist, McKibben’s main motive is to inspire activism in his readers.