Reviews

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

andrea_edwards's review against another edition

informative reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

lraoutrha's review against another edition

3.0

Provocative? Yes. Fascinating and well-researched? Yes. Sent me into a depressive spiral every time i picked it up? Also yes.

adnielsen's review against another edition

5.0

This is a very cool, short book that blends history, physical science, and social science to imagine the next hundred years during a global climate crisis. The authors imagine this world in the near future that has rapidly increasing temperatures, melting ice caps, and mass human relocation. I think they are a bit overly pessimistic with potential geo-engineering solutions to climate change. I found the book to be very intelligently written and is a very plausible imagination of a bleak future due to climate change.

kristy's review against another edition

challenging dark informative medium-paced

4.5

peterkc's review against another edition

4.0

The authors find a creative way to talk about the future effects of climate change

noodal's review against another edition

2.0

Knowledge did not translate into power.

This essay is more fun if you think of it as Oreskes and Conway building a alternate future that juts out of our own timeline in 2014 - a world where the Paris Agreement didn't exist, where the momentum of climate movements in the last 5 years never took off, where the fossil fuel executives won. As someone else commented, this is merely exposition for something that could be much more interesting.

I also find it interesting that a lot of dystopian fiction that aims to be realistic assumes that countries are likely to merge sovereignty, especially around the time this work was published. Thus, the world in The Collapse of Western Civilization is also without the rising populism and protectionism we've seen in the last few years.

My main issue though, from a genre perspective, is wondering whether it is realistic that a historian 300 years from now would have this much depth and detail of the events in the present. I'm no historian, but I don't imagine that today's historians are as equipped with this level of certainty for the events that happened in the 1700s.

One could argue that our ability to collect and store data nowadays is much more advanced than then, but could the wealth of information we have at our disposal now survive 300 years? I mean, the average smartphone only lasts a maximum of five years. What is the lifespan of a cloud server even? I'm more curious about the resilience of information in this future scenario than the speculative circumstances.

elisejacobson's review against another edition

5.0

This essay is an incredible creative look at the long-term effects of climate change. From the point of view of a "future historian" the authors were able to give a strong, credible idea of what the future may hold and what mistakes we are making today, and confront the issue of people believing junk climate-denial science by making this fiction sound serious and trustworthy.

While it paints a scary picture of the future, I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become more literate in the issues we need to tackle regarding climate change today!

noahbw's review against another edition

5.0

This essay/book is an excellent, and haunting, re-presentation of what we know with an additional perspective added. Oreskes and Conway concisely deliver centuries of western thought and decades of climate science to offer a crash course in the road we're on.

Also: they explain neoliberalism.

abbyfrelier's review against another edition

challenging dark funny reflective sad fast-paced

3.5

It's encouraging to know just how much the picture had changed since this pub date in 2014 but it remains a possible outcome for sure. Had some issues with the stances taken in some places like where the authors were weirdly positive on the 1 child policy in multiple places (climate activists don't do eugenics challenge) and the question of developing nations significantly increasing fossil fuel consumption is not an easy moral question or of a scale to be handwaved away. The wry humor was appreciated however and it is good to be reminded that our government is incapable of solving the problems we've created!

charlottebreads's review against another edition

a bit of a slog—it is an essay—but with an interesting premise and important message.