A review by friend0
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

challenging informative tense medium-paced

5.0

"It is tempting to look at these strings of disasters and think, Climate change is here...: "a new normal." The truth is actually scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place... The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know about human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead."

This book rocked me to my core. After I grieved through part one, which outlines our potential (and current) climate suffering, Wallace-Wells surprised me with a compelling discussion about the storytelling of climate change. How does such an unfathomably big, complex, and permanent crisis affect how we talk about progress? neoliberalism? history? humanity? 
 
Here are the questions I'm asking myself post-read, which I expect will guide the next few years of my life: Knowing the earth will markedly deteriorate in my lifetime, what are my values and priorities? How do I plan for catastrophe? And what's my role in mending it?