When faced with the “toxic knowledge” of global warming, there are two avenues available to humanity: swift and optimistic action, or despair and inertia. Only one of these routes will actually do anything to combat climate change. As The Uninhabitable Earth unfolds, offering unflinching looks at the impending ravages of climate change, the book suggests that despair in the face of warming is inexcusable. As difficult as optimism may seem, optimism is the only path that allows for the salvation not just of humanity but of the Earth as we know it.
After laying out the painful and destructive forecast for life on a warming planet, the book acknowledges that, for many, despair and nihilism seem to be the only reaction to such dread. The most acute sufferers of climate despair are, of course, those who have dedicated their lives to studying the effects of warming: scientists and climatologists. Many of these experts, the book says, have already “pass[ed] through many dark nights of the soul”—and realized that when the rest of the planet realizes the scale and scope of what is happening, they, too, will have to reckon with deep existential despair. But to many of these experts, “alarm is not the same as fatalism”—and in many cases, hope is a more motivating emotion than fear. Still, “climate fatalism” and “ecocide” are the feelings and affects that many professionals and laymen alike embody when faced with the realities of climate change. “Political depression” and the internalized rhetoric of humanity as an already “undead species” threaten to stop the fight against climate change in its tracks. With so many uncertain of how the earth can still be salvaged, it’s easy to see how many people feel there’s nothing to do but wait for the worst to come.
At the same time, the book warns that phenomena like “climate despair” and “eco-nihilism” represent a kind of detachment that allows for more inaction—thus worsening, unmitigated effects of climate change. “Climate change could become not a spur to change but an alibi, a cover, for inaction and irresponsibility,” the book warns. In other words, it would be very easy, at this point in our warming journey, for humanity to claim that there’s nothing that can be done to reverse our mistakes. This would only lead to greater consumption—a sort of “carpe diem,” seize-the-day attitude, and the direct opposite of what the planet (and humanity) needs to survive. “Doom [eats] away at the infrastructure of things like termites or carpenter bees.” The more that humanity feels its own doom, the less likely we are to seek for alternative ways of living. But rather than throw our hands up at the disasters overtaking the planet, the book suggests, humanity must collectively agree to fight back against the eroding force of existential doom. If humanity lets itself despair, business as usual will continue—and many countries may even up their carbon outputs in the years to come. Running itself into the ground isn’t the right path for humanity, the book suggests—self-pitying inaction would be an unconscionable response to the call to action that warming represents.
The only way to pull ourselves out of this mess, the book suggests, is to commit to the optimistic hope that things still can be changed—and to take the necessary, radical, collective action needed to make that change possible. As author David Wallace-Wells states: “Global warming is, after all, a human invention. And the flip side of our real-time guilt is that we remain in command. […] We are all its authors. And still writing.” So while many scientists and sociologists themselves are alarmed and perturbed by the rapid changes taking place across the planet, almost all of them still stress that some version of optimism is needed. Whether this new optimism takes the shape of courage, rage, or protest doesn’t matter—but what is important is that humans collectively commit to a belief in meaningful change. At this point, the difference between arriving at an inhospitable world and a “relatively livable” one by the end of the century comes down to collective hope and faith. While such thinking may be “naïve” or “crazy” in the face of so many setbacks and obstacles, the book stresses that the emotion of hope isn’t the point. What matters is the will to create action out of fear—to continue collectively imagine a future rather than resigning ourselves to desolation. In other words, believing destruction is inevitable makes it inevitable; envisioning and working toward a new world makes that new world possible. “If we do nothing about carbon emissions […] whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of this century,” writes author David Wallace-Wells—but at the same time, he notes that “[these] horrors are not yet scripted. We are staging them by inaction.” In other words, what happens to the planet—and to humanity—is up to our own ability to locate and commit to hope.
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Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism ThemeTracker
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism Quotes in The Uninhabitable Earth
Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before.
But as "familiar" as sea-level rise may seem, it surely deserves its place at the center of the picture of what damage climate change will bring. That so many feel already acclimated to the prospect of a near-future world with dramatically higher oceans should be as dispiriting and disconcerting as if we'd already come to accept the inevitability of extended nuclear war-because that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.
By accidents of geography and by the force of its wealth, the United States has, to this point, been mostly protected from the devastation climate change has already visited on parts of the less-developed world—mostly. The fact that warming is now hitting our wealthiest citizens is not just an opportunity for ugly bursts of liberal schadenfreude; it is also a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting. All of a sudden, it's getting a lot harder to protect against what's coming.
Extreme weather is not a matter of "normal"; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.
Today, the crisis is political—which is to say, not inevitable or necessary or beyond our capacity to fix—and, therefore, functionally elective. That is one reason it is nevertheless harrowing as a climate parable: an abundant resource made scarce through governmental neglect and indifference, bad infrastructure and contamination, careless urbanization and development.
Already, aerosols have been reflecting so much sunlight away from the earth that, in the industrial era, the planet has only heated up two-thirds as much as it would have otherwise. […] The result is […] a "devil's bargain": a choice between public-health-destroying pollution on the one hand, and, on the other, clear skies whose very clearness and healthiness will dramatically accelerate climate change.
The global halving of economic resources would be permanent, and, because permanent, we would soon not even know it as deprivation, only as a brutally cruel normal against which we might measure tiny burps of decimal-point growth as the breath of a new prosperity. We have gotten used to setbacks on our erratic march along the arc of economic history but we know them as setbacks and expect elastic recoveries. What climate change has in store is not that kind of thing—not a Great Recession or a Great Depression but, in economic terms, a Great Dying.
But wars are not caused by climate change only in the same way that hurricanes are not caused by climate change, which is to say they are made more likely, which is to say the distinction is semantic.
And while it may seem intuitive that those contemplating the end of the world find themselves despairing, especially when their calls of alarm have gone almost entirely unheeded, it is also a harrowing forecast of what is in store for the rest of the world, as the devastation of climate change slowly reveals itself. […] This may be why so many of them seem concerned with the risks of crying wolf about warming: they’ve learned enough about public apathy to worry themselves into knots about just when, and precisely how, to raise the alarm.
At what point will the climate crisis grow undeniable, un-compartmentalizable? How much damage will have already been selfishly done? How quickly will we act to save ourselves and preserve as much of the way of life we know today as possible? For the sake of clarity, I've treated each of the threats from climate change—sea-level rise, food scarcity, economic stagnation—as discrete threats, which they are not. Some may prove offsetting, some mutually reinforcing, and others merely adjacent. But together they form a latticework of climate crisis, beneath which at least some humans, and probably many billions, will live. How?
What does it mean to be entertained by a fictional apocalypse as we stare down the possibility of a real one? One job of pop culture is always to serve stories that distract even as they appear to engage. […] In a time of cascading climate change, Hollywood is also trying to make sense of our changing relationship to nature, which we have long regarded from at least an arm's length—but which, amid this change, has returned as a chaotic force we nevertheless understand, on some level, as our fault. The adjudication of that guilt is another thing entertainment can do […] in projecting rather than accepting guilt. […] In fictional stories of climate catastrophe we may also be looking for catharsis, and collectively trying to persuade ourselves we might survive it.
Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless, even if we are nominally "in charge." In the modern age, at least, there is also the related tendency to view large human systems, like the internet or industrial economy, as more unassailable, even more un-intervenable, than natural systems, like climate, that literally enclose us. This is how renovating capitalism so that it doesn't reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off by a degree or two.
Of course, those are religious fantasies: to escape the body and transcend the world. […] The solution[s to climate change that the tech world offers are] not […] rational one[s]. Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars.
We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it.
If the world's most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won’t get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes.
One threat of climate catastrophe is that [certain] strains of ecological nihilism might find a home in the host of consensus wisdom—and that their premonitions may seem familiar to you is a sign that some of that anxiety and despair is already leaching into the way so many others think about the future of the world.
These are the disconcerting, contradictory lessons of global warming, which counsels both human humility and human grandiosity, each drawn from the same perception of peril. The climate system that gave rise to the human species, and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it.
The path we are on as a planet should terrify anyone living on it, but, thinking like one people, all the relevant inputs are within our control, and there is no mysticism required to interpret or command the fate of the earth. Only an acceptance of responsibility.
