We have the power to stop them from happening entirely if we take the necessary action.” “The scale of suffering that is possible…can be so overwhelming that it feels paralyzing, but, ultimately, the size of those impacts are a measure of our own agency. His first child was born while he was writing the book, which has only increased his resolve to address these problems. “This is something that I see impacting absolutely every aspect of our lives in the decades ahead unless we change course somewhat dramatically.” But Wallace-Wells is actually a pretty optimistic person, all things considered. “I think that the psychology of everyone on the planet in, say, 2075, will be shaped by these forces,” he says. That alarmist outlook may soon be the new normal. “My article came at the end of a long period in which scientists, science journalists and activists all felt a bit constrained in the way they were talking about these issues - always feeling it was important to be emphasizing optimism and hope - sometimes even at the expense of honesty about what the state of the science was.” The piece was, at the time, the most popular story his magazine had ever run, and it was “proof that a different kind of climate story could reach a different audience and engage a different type of reader,” he says. “I think in general the mood and strategic perspective of people who work on this stuff closely have changed,” says Wallace-Wells. īut this time around, the audience was ready for Cassandra’s warnings. (Opening line: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”) Boiling cities, burned-out forests, acidic oceans, increasing pandemics, fertile soil transmuted into deserts and ever-increasing extinctions. That book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, presents a terrifying portrait of where civilization is headed. Even thinkers who derided the framing of his original piece have since come around, praising his new book, which follows up and expands upon the information he compiled in the article. Suddenly, climate alarmism was everywhere. But Wallace-Wells, 36, was (sadly) validated last autumn when a major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released that more or less argued people had until 2050 to get their shit together - or face trying to forge a life through a man-made hell-on-earth.
For decades, scientists and journalists have been ringing the alarm on climate change, but few forced people to sit up and take notice like New York Magazine’s David Wallace-Wells, whose alarming article “The Uninhabitable Earth” caused a bit of an uproar in climate and environmentalist circles when it was published in 2017.
0 kommentar(er)
