David Wallace-Wells Allen Lane, 2019, HB, 320pp, £20.00, 978-0241355213
Nearly half a century ago my undergraduate degree included a module entitled ‘Human Ecology’. Our reading included Paul Ehrlich’s seminal Population, Resources, Environment; the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth; and Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos’s Only One Earth: the Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet.
We learned about the greenhouse effect; we knew that our civilisation and material abundance were predicated on the profligate and ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels; we knew that population growth and concomitant resource consumption could not continue indefinitely — and we assumed, naïvely, that this knowledge would soon become widespread, that solutions would be found, and that, possibly, the world would reach a steady state of sustainable productivity and a fair distribution of goods.
How wrong we were. In the sudden, belated, but welcome burst of interest in the climate emergency that now undeniably confronts us, a plethora of books on the subject is hitting the shelves, but if you are spoilt for choice or short of time, this is the one to read. David Wallace-Wells is a journalist and deputy editor of New York magazine, and caused a stir with a major article about global warming in July 2017. This book is an expansion of the issues discussed in that article, and covers just about every aspect of the subject. It does so in language that is at once elegant and urgent, and laced with powerful metaphors and striking similes; and it is supported by 65 pages of footnotes that leave one in no doubt that the author has done his homework.
The first section of the book is entitled ‘Cascades’, and emphasises the scale, speed, and self-reinforcing properties of the climate chaos that has already begun to engulf us. Among its more arresting facts is this: we have produced more atmospheric carbon in the 30 years since Al Gore’s first book on climate than in all the millennia preceding it.
The second part of the book, ‘Elements of Chaos’, is a whistlestop tour through the tunnel of horrors that climate change creates — drought, famine, flooding, dying oceans, unbreathable air, disease epidemics, economic collapse, enforced migration, and armed conflict. Towards the end of this section we read:
‘If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic.’
Quite so.
Yet you should read on, for the third section, ‘The Climate Kaleidoscope’, is the most important, going beyond the catalogue of disaster into a discussion of our cultural assumptions, the power of ideologies (political and economic), ideas about history and ‘progress’, and what kinds of ethics might emerge as the crisis unfolds. Will we find a historically unprecedented capacity for universal cooperation and empathy, or — as seems more likely — ‘by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, [will we] find ways to engineer new indifference?’
The concluding chapter, ‘The Anthropic Principle’, reminds us — as did Barbara Ward in 1972 — that this is the one planet we have. The Voyager 1 space probe showed us:
‘... the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not … You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.’
The strength of this book lies in the way that it forces the reader to confront not only the external facts, but also their own subjective responses to the threats posed by runaway climate change. Moreover, despite the generally terrifying implications of his ‘story of the future’, the author has a positive message, albeit one buried in an extensive footnote on page 295:
‘I believe in engagement [his emphasis] above all, engagement wherever it may help. In fact, I find any other response to the climate crisis morally incomprehensible.’
Sir David Attenborough, the inspirational Swedish student Greta Thunberg, and the innovative activists of Extinction Rebellion have shown us that engagement is possible and essential. Writing this review has increased my own engagement, and reading it might do the same for you. We owe it to our children and grandchildren — and to all the generations who follow them. Whether their planet remains hospitable to any kind of humane civilisation is largely down to us.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2019
