The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
Ratings45
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings45
Average rating3.8
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Reviews with the most likes.
This is a must read book on climate change.
Reading this book honestly made me feel considerably more anxious about the state of our earth. However, he's right—the reality is that the situation is absolutely dire, and if we don't do anything about it soon then we're all f*cked.
I do have a couple of criticisms about the book: 1) I wish it was written in more straightforward language (yes the writing was beautiful but he could've said the same thing in less words), 2) some parts felt a little repetitive.
Overall, great book though. Honestly at this point everyone should be aware of the state we are in, and thus I'd highly recommend this to anyone and everyone.
This book was really, really hard to read. Not because it discusses what might happen to our planet and our species in the face of unchecked climate change, which it does and which I think is a worthwhile endeavor, but because of the time it does spend discussing solutions (which seemed beyond its scope).
The book ascribes plenty of blame to our individual actions (the last plane ticket you purchased put meters of arctic ice into the ocean, did you know) but insists that anything any one of us does (including not having kids, opting for a hermetic existence, and even self-immolating) is ineffectual and even silly in the face of inevitable catastrophe. It's not wholly fatalistic (the author seems to think that at least his hypothetical grandchildren will be okay if we “just” demolish capitalism and nation-states in the next few years) but still somehow entirely unhopeful and castigating. This may well be intentional (the author rails a lot against complacency) but I'm less useful, not more, when my anxiety is inflamed.
Overall I learned a lot about climate change, but it was not an exercise that was good for my mental health and it planted a lot of “weeds” in my headspace that, even if true, I don't appreciate (there's no point in saving for retirement, voting for greener political candidates is pointless, it's futile to try and make the world better). I am relieved to finally be finished with it.
I didn't quite finish this before the audiobook zipped back to the library but I got close enough – and the reason I didn't finish before the due date is because this book is a slog. The author uses the phrase “which is to say” approximately a thousand times, is deeply enamored with adverbs, and writes in a dense and somewhat confusing way, vascillating between describing a catastrophic effect of climate change as a foregone conclusion and then writing something like “but actually, scientists don't know how this will play out and there are several things that might stop it.” (I mean, just admit that we don't know exactly what might happen up front?)
It's entirely possible that I had trouble engaging with this book because it's so very bleak. For the first couple hours I did feel weirdly empowered by getting a vision of what a heavily climate-change-affected world might look like – and hope because, in the introduction, the author notes that he decided to become a parent despite the bleak outlooks. Wallace-Wells does do a good job of describing scientific processes in laymen's terms (things like the Albedo effect and carbon capture). I do feel like I received a broad survey of the potential effects of climate change which I did not previously have appreciation for, though the sheer volume of information (and perhaps the audiobook format) made it difficult to hold onto the information. That said, the most concrete conclusion I got from this book was that we really have no damn clue what climate change will wreak upon us, except that it's probably going to be pretty damn bad. And that at this point, cutting emissions will not on its own be enough to change the course – that now, we do actually need to look at technology solutions in addition to drastic changes to our infrastructure and ways of life.
Featured Prompt
35 booksApril is Earth Month! 🌎 What fiction or nonfiction books would you recommend to readers who want to learn more about environmental issues, climate crisis, and protecting our planet?
