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aberhey 's review for:
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
I am a very happy, relaxed person who has never had to experience mental illness. But I will say that while reading this book, I thought about killing myself for the first time in my life.
That is not because I didn't read about climate change before but because only very recently scientists and non-fiction authors have dared to start talking about non-ideal scenarios. About horrible things we might still avoid, but might also not avoid. This book collects a lot of those scenarios and made me wonder whether there really was even a one percent chance that we were not gonna kill most of humanity over the next few hundred years. I have recovered a bit, but certainly not because of this book.
While the first part is extremely strong (with one exception that I will discuss below), the second part is more of an afterthought - it feels like I read it while still in shock because I remember hardly anything from it, except for a weird sense that Wallace-Wells was faking even the little bit of optimism he displayed there. He talks about climate storytelling, capitalism, tech solutions, the circle of history and "crazy" climate alarmists who are most likely wrong but alarmingly less crazy than most people in politics today. Again, nothing really makes in impression here after the detonation that was the first part.
I did consider abandoning this very impressive book on page 6 because of an outrageous, and outrageously stupid statement I will quote to you in full here: Wallace-Wells tries to portray himself as a non-enviornmentalist (and succeeds): "I'm not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I'm also not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you're at the top of the food chain it's okay to flaunt it, because I don't see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of color that all of a sudden there's talk of extending human-rights-like legal protection to chimps, apes and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood."
Wow. So, so much wrong in so few words. Aside from the fact that Wallace-Wells has apparently never read even a single article from the field that is animal ethics, in which 99% of all serious scholars agree that what we are currently doing to animals is fundamentally wrong and needs to stop because animals suffer. No, he also believes himself to be at the top of the food chain even though he thinks he cannot even bring himself to slaughter a cow. He thinks that women and people of colour should be insulted at the thought that another group could share their newly acquired rights (no, David), with his logic also implying that apparently women should have felt insulted when POC became legal persons in their country (no, David, just no).
Most importantly, this person that has spent years collecting and reading research on climate change, has still not understood that everyone's personal lifestyle will have to change if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change. We are wasting so, so many calories of plant food feeding it to animals living in unspeakable conditions. Fighting climate change means no animal products in the West, no flights, no cars in cities. What's with the cognitive dissonance, David? Or are you waiting for a politician to ban meat for you?
I don't understand why his editor let him keep that paragraph in the book. It's a deterrant to anyone who's read just about anything in the animal ethics department or about the factory farming industry's impact on our climate.
Also, on a side note, this is not an easy read because the syntax is often confusing and convoluted. Super unhelpful for a book that's supposed to be read by the masses.
That is not because I didn't read about climate change before but because only very recently scientists and non-fiction authors have dared to start talking about non-ideal scenarios. About horrible things we might still avoid, but might also not avoid. This book collects a lot of those scenarios and made me wonder whether there really was even a one percent chance that we were not gonna kill most of humanity over the next few hundred years. I have recovered a bit, but certainly not because of this book.
While the first part is extremely strong (with one exception that I will discuss below), the second part is more of an afterthought - it feels like I read it while still in shock because I remember hardly anything from it, except for a weird sense that Wallace-Wells was faking even the little bit of optimism he displayed there. He talks about climate storytelling, capitalism, tech solutions, the circle of history and "crazy" climate alarmists who are most likely wrong but alarmingly less crazy than most people in politics today. Again, nothing really makes in impression here after the detonation that was the first part.
I did consider abandoning this very impressive book on page 6 because of an outrageous, and outrageously stupid statement I will quote to you in full here: Wallace-Wells tries to portray himself as a non-enviornmentalist (and succeeds): "I'm not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I'm also not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you're at the top of the food chain it's okay to flaunt it, because I don't see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of color that all of a sudden there's talk of extending human-rights-like legal protection to chimps, apes and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood."
Wow. So, so much wrong in so few words. Aside from the fact that Wallace-Wells has apparently never read even a single article from the field that is animal ethics, in which 99% of all serious scholars agree that what we are currently doing to animals is fundamentally wrong and needs to stop because animals suffer. No, he also believes himself to be at the top of the food chain even though he thinks he cannot even bring himself to slaughter a cow. He thinks that women and people of colour should be insulted at the thought that another group could share their newly acquired rights (no, David), with his logic also implying that apparently women should have felt insulted when POC became legal persons in their country (no, David, just no).
Most importantly, this person that has spent years collecting and reading research on climate change, has still not understood that everyone's personal lifestyle will have to change if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change. We are wasting so, so many calories of plant food feeding it to animals living in unspeakable conditions. Fighting climate change means no animal products in the West, no flights, no cars in cities. What's with the cognitive dissonance, David? Or are you waiting for a politician to ban meat for you?
I don't understand why his editor let him keep that paragraph in the book. It's a deterrant to anyone who's read just about anything in the animal ethics department or about the factory farming industry's impact on our climate.
Also, on a side note, this is not an easy read because the syntax is often confusing and convoluted. Super unhelpful for a book that's supposed to be read by the masses.