Books: The Uninhabitable Earth. A Story of the Future

Abstract

David Wallace-Wells Allen Lane , 2019 , HB, 320 pp, £ 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, …