Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Uninhabitable Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness
Human Responsibility and the Natural World
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism
The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity
Summary
Analysis
What David Wallace-Wells calls cascades, climate scientists refer to as “systems crises.” The American military calls them “threat multipliers,” citing not just armed conflicts but mass refugee crises as the threats in question. 13 million Americans alone will be displaced by the threats associated with warming—but the US, a wealthy nation, will not be the first or the hardest hit by the ravages of climate crisis.
At this point in the book, it’s clear that the cascades that will compound and feed into one another as warming seizes the planet will change the face of our Earth. But the greater toll on humanity—and the injustice that toll will represent—is a more complex thing to explore.
Themes
Slowly-developing countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo—the countries which produce the least emissions—will, ironically and tragically, be the most affected. And when scarcity, uncertainty, and desperation take hold of these countries, cascades of conflict will begin to unfold. By 2050, there could be 200 million to a billion climate refugees in need of shelter and resources. The “scrambling” that climate disaster produces will surely change the face of global society forever.
Climate injustice is a very real threat. As countries suffer the physical, social, and economic effects of climate change, not everyone will suffer equally. As refugee crises and political turmoil—side effects of fewer resources, shrinking land masses, and social unrest—seize different countries around the globe, a new kind of inequality will emerge. Every part of humanity’s experience of life on Earth will be changed by warming.
Themes
Another system soon to fall into crisis is the human body itself. Pollution and tropical diseases are not the only things that will pose an immediate threat to human health around the globe: water pollution in the wake of natural disasters and rainfall shocks that deplete nutrients from food supplies will mean that once-prosperous communities will have to reckon with deprivation. While many people will, in the coming years, decide not to reproduce, believing catastrophe to be inevitable, “stoic wisdom [can be] an alibi for indifference.”
Even though climate change will take an immense toll on the planet and its human inhabitants alike, the book stresses that it’s irresponsible to state that things are already so far gone that there’s no sense in investing in our planet’s future. To do so is to give into the climate despair that not only tolerates but rewards indifference and inaction.
Themes
The biological, social, and economic problems ahead are bad enough—but the psychological effect of living in a collapsing world is yet another cascade. Research shows that 62 percent of Hurricane Katrina evacuees developed acute stress disorder. Scientists and climatologists have been shown to experience “climate depression” or “environmental grief” at a high rate, but their secondhand suffering is nothing compared to those who are experiencing the early stages of climate chaos firsthand. Throughout the world, natural disasters leave those in their wake suffering not just with pressing issues of food scarcity, polluted resources, and crumbling infrastructure, but also with severe and overwhelming cases of PTSD. As temperatures rise globally, suicide rates increase—40,000 additional annual suicides are possible by 2050 if emissions don’t stop.
This passage examines the psychological side effects of enduring natural disasters and of living on a warming planet where destruction and death tolls are only continuing to rise. The cascades on display in this section of the book aren’t just about compounding natural crises—those cascades bleed over into realm of the human, too, highlighting the inseparability of the natural world and the human one.
Themes
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The research that this book has laid out so far comes from our world today—a world that’s just one degree warmer. Though some of the book’s predictions and projections will be proven false, everything that researchers and climatologists know right now comes from precedent—and there is no precedent for what will happen next on a warming planet.
Scientists and climatologists are using what’s happening in today’s world—a world already significantly affected by warming—to determine what will unfold in the years to come should humanity take no meaningful political action to halt emissions. Projecting how climate change will drastically alter life on Earth is one of the best shots these experts have at shaking the world’s nations from their inertia.
Themes
50 years ago, there was barely any research about climate change—and in 50 years, scientists will know even more about how systems crises interact and unfold. Much is difficult to predict, but all 12 threats outlined in this section of the book are well within the realm of possibility. Humans will shape how these cascades unfold, how much more damage we are willing to endure, and how quickly we are prepared to mobilize against the “latticework of climate crisis.”
Preparing for the unknown effects of global warming won’t just mean building sea walls or creating carbon capture plants—the whole of global society must be ready for social, political, economic, and psychological turmoil at every level of civilization. As global warming cascades through our world, there’s no telling which crises will develop first and how they’ll feed off of one another. But what is undeniable is the fact that these systems are intimately intertwined, and that when one domino begins to fall, the rest are sure to follow.
Themes
