Between 1833 and 1836, an ambitious young New Yorker painted his vision of the evolution of human society. In five grand canvases, Thomas Cole described an arc from nature, through pastoralism and empire, to desolation. This is the archetypal story of rise and fall.
In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells now takes up Cole’s mantle, updated for the 21st century. We’re at the apex of the story arc, pivoting from blind triumph to hubristic ruin. He tells of coming climate catastrophes, brought on by our complacency and profligacy. These devastations will likely end history, culture and ethics as we know them. The portents surround us, but we wilfully turn away. A glimmer of hope, though, is present if we mend our ways.
There is much to learn from this book. From media and scientific reports of the past decade, Wallace-Wells sifts key predictions and conveys them in vivid prose. He trebles the size of the Book of Revelation’s posse of horsemen, elucidating a dozen categories of anguish including heat death, conflagration, poisoned air and water, psychological trauma, and societal collapse. As he points out, none of this is news. Yet for most of us, the terrifying projections of where our planet is headed arrive in our ears overwhelmed by a cacophony of media reports blaring the day’s politics and entertainment.
For those not steeped in news about climate change, this is a lively introduction to both the latest predictions and their uncertainties. Wallace-Wells not only summarises recent projections, but excavates important unifying themes. Rapidity is one of these. The climate crisis was largely created by the actions of just a single generation. The physiological and psychological limits of human life are another. Many climate projections indicate that we’ll increasingly cross these limits. The latter part of the book is less grounded in science and data, and comprises a series of riffs about the future of human culture and society.
If you’ve snoozed through or turned away from the climate change news, this book will waken and update you. If you’re steeped in the unfolding climate drama, Wallace-Wells’s voice and perspective will be stimulating, even when you don’t agree with every interpretation and rhetorical move. This is part of his aim: to startle and shake us.
The valuable core of the book is contained within a rind of unnecessary exaggeration. The book’s title belies its contents. Nowhere does he claim that Earth will be uninhabitable. Bill McKibben’s recent summary is more apt: the habitable area of the planet is shrinking, a calamity vast enough not to need overstating. The opening paragraphs of the book burn strawmen to fuel the claim that “you” readers do not understand how bad things are. Billions of people do, in fact, understand how bad things are, through their intellects, emotions and lived realities. The claim that bitcoin “consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined” misuses a speculative projection in a Grist article and is off by a factor of 100 (in 2017, bitcoin used about 2.55GW, global photovoltaic capacity was 398GW). Such claims are eye-catching and get the story in front of the insouciant. But they are also what alienated many climate researchers from Wallace-Wells’s New York Magazine essay of the same title.
Yet, occasional factual errors aside, where “exaggeration” starts is hard to say given our improvident trajectory. A time of crisis demands a multiplicity of responses, including voices of alarm. Not every call to action will strike the same balance between woe and hope. That Wallace-Wells has irritated some contemporary specialists in “climate communication” is perhaps a healthy sign that discussions of climate are now reaching far beyond the measured discourse of academia and intergovernmental panels.
How, then, to act in the face of these frightening projections? This is not a book of solutions. Wallace-Wells outlines some political and economic pathways – taxes and public investments – but gives them little exposition. He’s dismissive about the value of changes in individual behaviours. He writes that choices by the “consumer class” about food and childbearing are manifestations of “ascetic pride” and “cop-outs”. He insists that he’s “not about to go vegan”, delivering a critique of consumerist neoliberalism with a burger in his hand. Consumer choices are largely distractions from or substitutes for political action, he argues. But this ignores the possibility that individual action might be a prerequisite to political change. Reformation of the self, including our behaviours as consumers, can inspire, inform and sustain political and cultural action. This is perhaps especially true for storytellers who wield influence through their widely heard voices.
Like Cole before him, Wallace-Wells’s project is a moral one, an indictment of his culture. Both narratives aim to convince us that the guiding beliefs of our times are wrong. But unlike Cole, who believed that self-annihilation was inevitable, Wallace-Wells insists that we can snap the narrative arc of rise and fall. Amid his stories of desolation and travail, he underscores our agency. This accounts for the excitement he feels about his newborn daughter’s future. She will live on a planet burned, flooded and baked out of recognition. But she will also, he believes, be a participant in what he calls “literally the greatest story ever told”, the possibility that calamity might somehow catalyse “a happy ending”.
If we are to find such an ending, it will not come from disembodied analysis alone. The book’s greatest omission is a lack of fieldwork. In its pages, we don’t go into the streets to talk to people, to hear their insights and perspectives. Instead, we hear Wallace-Wells interpreting an impressive stack of news clippings, interviews with specialists, and papers. But even the best scientific paper is one step removed from its subjects. In Walt Whitman’s words, we “take things at second or third hand”. Our greatest fear should perhaps be that we have forgotten how to listen to the living Earth.
David George Haskell is author of The Songs of Trees and The Forest Unseen, and professor of biology at Sewanee: The University of the South, Tennessee
• The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
