TY - JOUR T1 - Books: <em>The Uninhabitable Earth. A Story of the Future</em> JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 353 LP - 353 DO - 10.3399/bjgp19X704453 VL - 69 IS - 684 AU - Dougal Jeffries Y1 - 2019/07/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/69/684/353.1.abstract N2 - David Wallace-Wells Allen Lane, 2019, HB, 320pp, £20.00, 978-0241355213Nearly 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, … ER -