You may remember David Wallace-Wells’s article “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was published in New York magazine in 2017—a piece so widely shared and hotly debated that it required its own Wikipedia article. The story rendered the abstract threat of climate change in concrete, even cinematic, terms, informing the reader without surrendering an ounce of high-level drama. “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” is Wallace-Wells’s book-length expansion of the piece, and it’s just as potent, if infinitely more depressing. At its worst, it could be described as apocalypse porn. At its best, it’s perhaps the richest inventory of climate-change research yet published. Wallace-Wells makes clear, through a stream of startling factoids, that individual consumption choices can never make the difference that policy changes can. (Our smug organic-produce shopping, in others words, is virtually meaningless.) And yet the tidbit that struck me most was a fairly mundane one. Wallace-Wells writes that higher pollution levels have been strongly linked to premature births and low birth weights—and that the “simple introduction of E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems, in the vicinity of toll plazas, by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, just by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars slowed to pay the toll.” Though a grim testament to the danger of carbon emissions, the fact that something as simple as E-ZPass could help is also encouraging. There may not be a silver bullet for climate change, but, as Wallace-Wells argues, there’s still far too much potential for change for hope to be lost. —Carrie Battan == And,
Nearly everyone I know who’s read Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” had told me that it inspired something akin to a personal crisis. The book, Odell’s first, is equal parts philosophical self-help and environmentalist tract, and it offers a fresh mode for thinking about life under technocapitalism––and also some suggestions for what might be done. Odell is particularly interested in questioning the assumptions and incentives of the digital economy. The perversions that spring from productivity culture (to say nothing of attention as a currency and a resource) are corrosive not only on the individual level, she argues, but on a larger, social scale. She draws comparisons between the Internet and the natural world, making a case for the long-term maintenance of self, community, and place, both online and off. (“I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thoughts,” she writes.) Self-care, in this model, is not commodified self-indulgence; it’s a form of preservation enacted by reclaiming and reallocating one’s attention. Odell is an artist, and her medium, often, is context—historicization, depth, analysis. This seems fitting. In a year in which the boundaries of cruelty and indifference stretched and expanded, there was also, among a certain set, a quieting or refocussing. In my own circles, some people disappeared periodically from Twitter and Facebook. A few grew more knowledgeable about plants and birds, or listened, with great conscientiousness, to non-algorithmic public radio. Most importantly, they began to ground themselves locally and socially and to reconsider where they placed value. The personal crises, it seems, had been productive. —Anna Wiener
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