David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

I've not met him IRL, and he's not following me on Twitter, either, but David Wallace-Wells seems a thoughtful, decent guy.

I say this because, frankly, you're meant to be overwhelmed and frightened by his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, and you should feel that way, but I wouldn't want you to hold it against him. Things are very difficult, many of them getting more so, but it's not his fault.

Good discussion (seriously!) at the Teen Vogue Book Club

There has been plenty of pushback against his book, even from reviewers who are on board with his message and approach. This critique has come mostly from people who've argued that it's too pessimistic ("Don't scare the plebs so much that they'll stop trying!"), though some has also come from those who find it too optimistic ("You're giving people hope, what's the matter with you?"), some who just plain disagree (you don't have to read that one. It might make your eyes roll), and some with aesthetic or stylistic concerns. (Some people, too, are flat out cranky, which I found especially weird given the apparent perspective of the site overall.)

But the thing is, a single book can't do everything, and the job of this one is to explain the ways in which climate change (which he sometimes calls global warming) could end up making the Earth broadly uninhabitable for humans. It doesn't offer precise solutions to climate change, as its critics line up to soberly intone, but he's a journalist writing about an issue that at this point, the whole world has found insoluble. Why on earth do these people think it's reasonable to complain that this one semi-random dude* hasn't solved the single greatest, most crucial, most intractable problem of our times?

"Okay, you've solved some of the Poincaré conjectures, which I guess is fine, but why haven't you solved the Riemann hypothesis? What's wrong with you?"

Anyway.

Emotionally speaking, The Uninhabitable Earth is a difficult read. Some readers complain that this book is too stuffed with information, or that it covers too much ground, but those people need to suck it up and think harder. Still, it's not easy to face this much detail about the ways in which the world could become incompatible with what we currently understand as human civilization, or indeed with most versions of civilization that we could imagine. It's not unusual for me to look for relief or diversion from my work (and yes, I've been reading this book for work), but I needed relief because I couldn't handle its insistent focus.

And I say that even though I really appreciated the fairly personable tone that Wallace-Wells strikes throughout The Uninhabitable Earth. Presumably others won't hear his voice in the same way, because we're similar enough demographically that external factors will mean I'm hearing him differently than others might, but Wallace-Wells is trying to avoid seeming remote in this book, and I think he manages this well.

If he didn't manage it, well, I wouldn't have been able to finish. The Uninhabitable Earth offers a terrific summary of how many of the diverse consequences of climate change could each separately blow up civilization, except that he also reminds us of how they can combine to blow it up even more thoroughly. Heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfire, dying oceans, unbreathable air: those are just the titles of some chapters, and they're enough all on their own to make me feel some mild hyperventilating coming on.

I've done an awful lot of reading in most of these areas, much of it in the academic literature, so I admit that I'm not a typical reader of The Uninhabitable Earth. Still, I wouldn't say I'm especially atypical, either, because much of it has passed near enough to mainstream media that the components should be on the radar of most folks with an interest in long-term human society.

And my sense is that this book is a really useful touchstone for the story of how, as a species on Earth, we'll collectively get to wherever we're going to get to. Some things have changed an awful lot since his early drafts in 2017, and if it was republished now in 2024, it'd need significant updates since its first appearance in 2020. Still, as a marker of pre-COVID climate worry, it's seriously useful. Per the excellent people at Teen Vogue, "There’s no hiding from the science because sooner or later, there will be no hiding from the reality on earth."

This fall I'll be teaching Rebecca Campbell's novella Arboreality, which among other things is about how climate change will affect my home place of Vancouver Island throughout the 21st century (beginning in the 2030s). I'm not assigning The Uninhabitable World to my students, but I'll be talking about it regularly. Neither of these books is alarmist, nor doomist neither, but it strikes me that both authors are appropriately alarmed, and as a minimum standard, that's the right way to feel right now.

As Wallace-Wells puts it, when he starts moving toward wrapping up the book, "we are never as shocked and horrified as we should be by the suffering we are living through today and expecting to arrive tomorrow" (p262). We should be shocked and horrified, so that's how you should feel after reading The Uninhabitable Earth, but we should also be looking forward to having tomorrow arrive.

Somewhere in there, between awareness and expectation, lies the frame of mind we'll need to sustain if we're going to make it through the next century. I think this book could help most readers find their toward that frame of mind, but at times it's going to be a painful path.

* The term "semi-random dude" is, of course, the internationally recognized synonym for "person without extensive, precisely relevant academic qualifications." In other words, I'm cranky about many, many of the reviews this book received.