Nonfiction Book Review: The Uninhabitable Earth
By Carrie Campbell, Five Points West Regional Branch Library
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells
Scroll through the headlines or watch the news this past week and you’ll find the following pastiche of stories:
In the new book by reporter David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, stories like these are presented not as the disparate problems of an increasingly complicated world, but as symptomatic of a singular, uniform, and existential threat to the modern way of life: an impending climate catastrophe.
What separates this book from other doomsayers of the genre is that Wallace-Wells is no scientist—in truth, he admits he undertook his reporting on climate science initially with a bit of a blase attitude. The eggheads have been predicting worst case scenarios his whole adult life, he thought. However, what Wallace-Wells soon discovers, and capably shares with his readers, is that although the science’s worst case predictors rarely come to pass, the climate skeptics’ best case scenarios have never proven accurate.
Instead, the author deftly and thoroughly presents readers with a litany of observable, detrimental, and sadly all-too-preventable effects of an ever-warming planet in the here and now. Wallace-Wells may lack the PhDs of other authors on this subject, but he has no shortage of lyrical prose and storytelling acumen. The challenge set before the author is how to describe a hazard that is both ever present and invisible, and through patient, empathetic, and visually arresting depiction of otherwise dry data points, he meets the challenge.
The first half of The Uninhabitable Earth serves as climate crisis baedeker, wherein the author shares the tangible effects of climate change as presented both in the latest science available and recent headlines. Although the occurrences of rising water levels, extended droughts, agricultural displacement, and stronger storms are likely familiar to most readers interested in the subject, Wallace-Wells rightly points out that mistaking these events as routine or even early indicators of a coming crisis is dangerous. The crisis is already upon us; these are the birth pangs of a would-be apocalypse.
In the remainder of his book, Wallace-Wells moves from diagnosis to prescription—and, like most physicians, he offers no easy remedies. The author does, however, present a careful and persuasive discourse on the effect climate change has had not just on science, but also on political discourse. The author illustrates how sober and rational voices are sidelined and smeared as hysterics in favor of well-funded, short-term-minded, entrenched political and financial interests. From fossil fuel extraction to consolidated corporate media, the author shows how the best voices for adapting to and halting a climate disaster are prevented from receiving a fair hearing. Listening to—and acting upon—those voices will be the biggest challenge in stopping the crisis.
However, Wallace-Wells is not guilty of the same nihilism found among climate change skeptics or the billionaire technocrats who believe some future inventor will solve global warming in the same way Eli Whitney changed the textile industry. Rather, he states a belief that the people reading his book today, as well as those people’s children, will recognize their shared threat and its responsibility. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence comes not from the science or growing political support for green solutions, but from the author’s own admission that, even while writing this book on earth’s potential end, he became the father of a newborn.
It will take that leap of faith, that commitment to act in our optimism, to literally save the world.
David Wallace-Wells
Scroll through the headlines or watch the news this past week and you’ll find the following pastiche of stories:
- Mississippi flood waters overtake portions of New Orleans.
- A man’s sports car reclaimed by the tide on Dauphin Island.
- More migrant families expected at the U.S. southern border.
- Wealth gap continues to expand across the developed world.
In the new book by reporter David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, stories like these are presented not as the disparate problems of an increasingly complicated world, but as symptomatic of a singular, uniform, and existential threat to the modern way of life: an impending climate catastrophe.
What separates this book from other doomsayers of the genre is that Wallace-Wells is no scientist—in truth, he admits he undertook his reporting on climate science initially with a bit of a blase attitude. The eggheads have been predicting worst case scenarios his whole adult life, he thought. However, what Wallace-Wells soon discovers, and capably shares with his readers, is that although the science’s worst case predictors rarely come to pass, the climate skeptics’ best case scenarios have never proven accurate.
Instead, the author deftly and thoroughly presents readers with a litany of observable, detrimental, and sadly all-too-preventable effects of an ever-warming planet in the here and now. Wallace-Wells may lack the PhDs of other authors on this subject, but he has no shortage of lyrical prose and storytelling acumen. The challenge set before the author is how to describe a hazard that is both ever present and invisible, and through patient, empathetic, and visually arresting depiction of otherwise dry data points, he meets the challenge.
The first half of The Uninhabitable Earth serves as climate crisis baedeker, wherein the author shares the tangible effects of climate change as presented both in the latest science available and recent headlines. Although the occurrences of rising water levels, extended droughts, agricultural displacement, and stronger storms are likely familiar to most readers interested in the subject, Wallace-Wells rightly points out that mistaking these events as routine or even early indicators of a coming crisis is dangerous. The crisis is already upon us; these are the birth pangs of a would-be apocalypse.
In the remainder of his book, Wallace-Wells moves from diagnosis to prescription—and, like most physicians, he offers no easy remedies. The author does, however, present a careful and persuasive discourse on the effect climate change has had not just on science, but also on political discourse. The author illustrates how sober and rational voices are sidelined and smeared as hysterics in favor of well-funded, short-term-minded, entrenched political and financial interests. From fossil fuel extraction to consolidated corporate media, the author shows how the best voices for adapting to and halting a climate disaster are prevented from receiving a fair hearing. Listening to—and acting upon—those voices will be the biggest challenge in stopping the crisis.
However, Wallace-Wells is not guilty of the same nihilism found among climate change skeptics or the billionaire technocrats who believe some future inventor will solve global warming in the same way Eli Whitney changed the textile industry. Rather, he states a belief that the people reading his book today, as well as those people’s children, will recognize their shared threat and its responsibility. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence comes not from the science or growing political support for green solutions, but from the author’s own admission that, even while writing this book on earth’s potential end, he became the father of a newborn.
It will take that leap of faith, that commitment to act in our optimism, to literally save the world.
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