The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells | 2019

If there is one book I could recommend to someone who wants to learn more about the climate crisis and its consequences, this would be it. Wallace-Wells is a gifted writer who is able to inform his audience about the scope and severity of the problem while still inspiring a degree of hope. He doesn’t present these numerous threats as isolated incidents, but rather as a systemic peril afflicting Earth and persuasively explains why our reaction has been so unsubstantial. His language is concise, his points hit hard, and he covers an incredible breadth of topics in relatively few pages.

“The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure.”

“This is a kind of Frankenstein problem, and relates to widespread fears of artificial intelligence: we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit.”