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
In 2018, environmental activist David Buckel set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to bring awareness to the climate crisis. His death signaled to many that the climate crisis demands a more intense political commitment than mere “ethical consumption.” In the years to come, empty gesturing will likely become popular across the social spectrum—banning cars, painting roofs white, and bragging about lowered carbon footprints, for instance.
By drawing attention to David Buckel’s protest suicide—and the empty gestures it laid bare—the book deepens its discussion of what kind of radical action is needed to finally bring widespread attention to the limited time we have left to halt emissions. Empty gestures focused on individual consumption won’t turn the tides of warming at all—only top-down legislative action will. Protestors like Buckel use radical, destructive action in hopes of opening people’s eyes to the suffering climate change will cause, but it's clear that even radical actions like these do not spur citizens or politicians out of their collective sense of denial.
Themes
The reality is that individual consumption isn’t the problem—the current political and economic order is. Individual solutions in the “wellness” and “new New Age” industries focus on a purification of individual daily life—non-toxic, organic, carbon-free products that don’t actually change anything (and often have a hefty carbon footprint themselves). “Conscious consumption” is essentially a cop-out.
Wellness routines and conscious consumption don’t actually meaningfully lower humanity’s carbon footprint—and the production of the accoutrements of these non-toxic, “carbon-free” products is undoubtedly yet another force adding pollution to the atmosphere. Individual consumers can’t shift the needle on warming—only radical political and economic action will do that.
Themes
These half-measures grow out of the political ethos of neoliberalism, which promised unending growth in the markets of the West. But the blind spots of neoliberalism have spawned philanthrocapitalism and the fallacy of a “moral economy.” Struggling citizens are asked to prove their worth in a system defined by competition and financial success—and neoliberalism’s promise of a stable, reliable, and cooperative international economy has been proven a sham. If poor countries flood while rich countries boom, climate crisis may soon deal neoliberalism one final blow. Tribalism, nationalism, and terrorism will take over.
It's no wonder that the only solutions to climate change offered within our neoliberal, capitalist society are small individual consumption choices. Big business is putting the burden of saving the world on the individual consumer rather than admitting its own role in the hastening of emissions and thus the rapid advance of climate change. Until these systems are dismantled—and the ”philanthrocapitalism” that the market hides behind is revealed to be the sham it is—there will be no meaningful, large-scale economic or political action against climate change.
Themes
With the collapse of neoliberalism, authoritarianism at the global level might begin to rise. A “neoliberalism beyond neoliberalism” in which a world-state concerned only with the growth of capital could possibly emerge. Though there is some hope for the emergence of a global alliance working in the name of common humanity, the impossibilities of dismantling capitalism threaten to instead prioritize wealth-focused autocracy. In this scenario, a population-dense, economically powerful country like China could take control of the “community of nations.” Disorder, conflict, and global war are just as possible as the creation of a “global order.” Given the international community’s inability to broker any kind of meaningful arrangement to halt or ease climate disaster, it seems that anarchy is just as possible as the rise of one global empire.
At the same time, if neoliberalism collapses, it’s not guaranteed that a better system will take its place. It will be hard to shake the world from its preoccupation with capitalist growth—and in a power vacuum, the world’s governments may ultimately declare a greater allegiance to continuing the growth of material wealth than to the radical action needed to start saving the planet. This is yet another way that warming will destabilize our world from the inside out—natural disasters won’t be the only potential factors in a rewiring of our global socioeconomic order.
Themes
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