In ‘The Uninhabitable Earth,’ Apocalypse Is Now
By Jennifer Szalai
March 6, 2019
More than halfway through “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David
Wallace-Wells addresses the reader directly, commending anyone who has “made it
this far” for being “brave.” After all, the previous pages of his book have
depicted in meticulous and terrifying detail the possible future that awaits
the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to
arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls
the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope.
Wallace-Wells is a deputy editor of New York magazine, where
two years ago he published an article on climate change that went viral,
understandably so; in 7,000 eloquent words, he bluntly laid out the calamitous
costs of doing nothing — or, perhaps more realistically and therefore more
menacingly, of doing something but not enough.
His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait
of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will
soon take over our waking life. The crumpled carcass of a bee on the cover
tells you only some of what you need to know. Yes, apian death gets passing
mention, but Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human
suffering and even extinction.
There’s plenty of science consulted here, but the book, he
writes, isn’t about the science of warming: “It is about what warming means to
the way we live on this planet.” He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water
scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate
enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill
more. All this could come with 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the threshold
that world leaders pledged to stay below in the Paris accords of 2015.
Yet Wallace-Wells insists he’s optimistic; and in fact, he
obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case
scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter
annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke
out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather
than apocalyptic.”
Books about global warming have sounded the alarm for some
time, with classic texts from writers like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben
chronicling the ways in which humans have irrevocably transformed the climate.
The science is “tentative, ever-evolving,” Wallace-Wells writes, but “none of
it is news.”
“The Uninhabitable
Earth” seems to be modeled more on Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” — or, at
least, it’s a bid to do for greenhouse gases what Carson’s 1962 book did for
pesticides. “Silent Spring” became a galvanizing force, a foundational text for
the environmental movement. The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is
an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how
quickly?”
Part of his strategy is to tell us how much we have already
lost. “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as
human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,” he writes. Some
of the technology we rely on to make the effects of climate change more
bearable, like air-conditioning, also worsens them. The harms of global warming
tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the
“cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and
indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.
Wallace-Wells avoids the “eerily banal language of
climatology” in favor of lush, rolling prose. The sentences in this book are
potent and evocative, though after a while of envisioning such unremitting
destruction — page upon page of toddlers dying, plagues released by melting
permafrost and wildfires incinerating tourists at seaside resorts — I began to
feel like a voyeur at an atrocity exhibition. His New York magazine article
already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and
scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this
expanded litany of horrors?
“Fear can motivate,” Wallace-Wells writes. He’s aware of
those who denounce the graphic doomsaying as “climate porn,” but he arrived at
his own ecological awakening when he started to collect “terrifying, gripping,
uncanny narratives” about climate change. He describes himself as a
Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out
of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became
immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too.
Besides, it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material
with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism —
quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a
comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called
“toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse —
“should be empowering.”
In the course of writing this book, even while staring down
the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world
doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be
living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a
happy ending.”
Wait — what? I found this lurching between sweet hopefulness
on the one hand and lurid pessimism on the other to be bewildering, like a heat
wave followed by a blizzard. But then Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer
something other than the standard narrative of climate change and collective
action, which “is, dramatically, a snore.” Mobilization is impossible for
people who are sleepwalking their way toward disaster; and mobilization is
necessary, he says, to deploy the tools at our disposal, which include carbon
taxes, carbon capture and green energy.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” wagers that we’ve grown inured to
cool recitations of the facts, and require a more direct engagement of
political will. “There is no single way to best tell the story of climate
change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and
none too dangerous to try,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Any story that sticks is a
good one.”
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Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.
The Uninhabitable Earth
Life After Warming
By David Wallace-Wells
310 pages. Tim Duggan Books. $27.
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