The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth

by

David Wallace-Wells

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Uninhabitable Earth makes teaching easy.

The Uninhabitable Earth Study Guide

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Brief Biography of David Wallace-Wells

David Wallace-Wells is a journalist and deputy editor of New York magazine. His work as a journalist is largely focused on the climate crisis and the near future of science and technology, especially as they relate to global warming. He was a 2019 New America Foundation National Fellow, and his debut work of book-length nonfiction, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
Get the entire The Uninhabitable Earth LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Uninhabitable Earth PDF

Historical Context of The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth is a book both tied to history and unbound from it. Wallace-Wells swings from the Earth’s past—12,000 years ago, when humans first began farming and cultivating lands—to its future. He looks as far ahead as 2100 as he offers data-driven, climatologist-backed projections of what the Earth will look like at the end of the century if climate change continues to ravage the planet at its current rate. Along the way, Wallace-Wells closely examines many major record-setting weather events, such as 1988’s Hurricane Mitch, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and 2017’s Thomas Fire in Southern California. By examining these massive natural disasters decade by decade, Wallace-Wells charts the rapidly worsening effects of warming on everyday life. While it may seem that a certain storm, like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, is a once-in-a-lifetime event, the reality is that the globe is warmer right now than it has been at any point in all of human history—and it’s only getting hotter. Just as climate change’s many cascades threaten to multiply and compound as they wash away the infrastructure of our society on any level, Wallace-Wells offers a barrage of data that offers an unflinching and terrifying look at how industrialization and the idea of the Anthropocene, or an era of human domination, has forever changed the course of our planet’s history.

Other Books Related to The Uninhabitable Earth

Throughout The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells engages with several seminal, important books by other journalists as well as scientists and climatologists. Among the books he mentions are Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, two books about how climate change stands to affect our global economy (and vice versa). He also cites the work of famed biologist E.O. Wilson, most notably Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, a book that outlines a warming scenario in which the southern hemisphere (and parts of the northern one, too) become uninhabitable, forcing humanity to migrate to and sequester themselves on small, habitable parts of the planet’s far north. Wallace-Wells also draws quotations from non-scientific works, such as the novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Joan Didion’s essay “Los Angeles Notebook” from her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Upton Sinclair’s cautionary fable The Jungle.
Key Facts about The Uninhabitable Earth
  • Full Title: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • When Written: 2017-2018
  • Where Written: New York, NY
  • When Published: 2019
  • Literary Period: Contemporary
  • Genre: Nonfiction, Science Writing, Climate Studies
  • Protagonist/Antagonist: Though The Uninhabitable Earth, as a nonfiction book, doesn’t have a traditional literary narrative structure, humanity is arguably the dual protagonist and antagonist of the book.
  • Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for The Uninhabitable Earth

Misleading Bees. The Uninhabitable Earth’s spare, plain cover features only a single image: a dead bee. In the book, Wallace-Wells calls attention to recent panics over mass bee death, or colony collapse disorder—but he reframes the panic as another way for humanity to wring its hands over a red herring rather than take decisive action and deal directly with the larger effects of climate change.