In The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, author David Wallace-Wells draws on climate data, reports form the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and conversations and interviews with politicians, scientists, climatologists, and everyday people to craft a portrait of what our rapidly warming Earth will soon begin to look like. The book begins with a section called “Cascades,” in which Wallace-Wells asserts that climate change is “much worse than you think.” The book charts the course the Earth is currently set on—four degrees Celsius in warming by the year 2100—and outlines the irreparable damages such an increase in temperature would do to the planet and all things that call it home. The earth has already warmed one degree Celsius, and already frequent Category 5 hurricanes, devastating wildfires and tornadoes, shifting climate maps, and migrating tropical disease are a normalized part of daily life. If humanity stays the course, prioritizing economic growth (and the unending carbon emissions needed to keep the global economy running,) the “cascading violence” of warming will trigger inescapable feedback loops of devastation from which humanity may never be able to recover.
In the book’s second section, “Elements of Chaos,” Wallace-Wells devotes one chapter to each of these cascades, or climate systems, in order to show how while they may seem distinct and independent from one another at first, each wildfire, hurricane, and microplastic leaked into the atmosphere feed one another’s viciousness. By exploring phenomena like the albedo effect and examining how natural disasters, refugee crises, psychological trauma, and food shortages promise to define humanity’s future, Wallace-Wells suggests that humanity will need to come up with a many-armed solution to climate change that addresses its many manifestations at once.
In the book’s third section, “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” Wallace-Wells examines the social, political, economic, and psychological effects of life under climate change. He examines humanity’s complicated relationship with the idea of warming, suggesting that we love consuming apocalyptic stories in our media because it helps us to envision the apocalypse as something sudden and beyond our control—when really, climate change is entirely humanity’s doing, and thus entirely humanity’s responsibility to fight back against. Examining the effects of neoliberal economics, the halting of nuclear power solutions, and climate denialism in the forms of “eco-nihilism” and “climate despair,” Wallace Wells suggests that in order to mount an offensive against climate change’s many cascades, humanity must first resist the impulse to “crumbl[e] collectively in despair.”
In the book’s final section, “The Anthropic Principle,” Wallace-Wells considers the Fermi paradox: if the universe is so big, why hasn’t humanity located any other intelligent life forms? The idea that humanity is alone in the universe is perhaps a narcissistic point of view, but Wallace-Wells offers a counterpoint to that characterization. He suggests that the narrow set of circumstances that have allowed human life to thrive on Earth is a gift that shouldn’t be taken for granted. Civilizations could have sprung up on Earth alone thousands of times before—and been erased or annihilated themselves each time. Wallace-Wells suggests that humanity should feel empowered by its singularity—and that we should all commit to doing whatever it takes to protect our one precious “Pale Blue Dot.” We have only one Earth, and only one chance to save it.
In a brief afterword written to accompany the book’s paperback edition, Wallace-Wells charts his own journey since the book’s publication. In just the year since the book’s initial publication, carbon emissions have only worsened. Yet Wallace-Wells asserts that he is still perhaps naively optimistic about humanity’s capacity to choose hope, collective action, and a reinvigorated, recommitted stewardship of the Earth over despair and inaction.
