The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.
The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric … advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.
- What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade?
- What could living in a city look like in 2030?
- How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States?
This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.
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Quite a few books about the climate crisis have appeared in the past five years or so. Many convey to the reader a long list of scary things that are about to happen, and increasingly, that are already happening related to climate change. The Future Earth by Eric Holthaus has its list of scary things, too – very scary. But this book is different for several reasons.
First, Holthaus addresses some really key topics that too many writers don’t even touch. Chief among them is that we’re undergoing a collapse of global civilization. That will worsen as more and more of us have trouble finding something to eat, or trouble surviving 120F temperatures or surviving massive storms and flooding. He argues that we need revolutionary changes in our political, economic and social systems. Our systems have been based on relatively unregulated capitalism for centuries now. The basic premise of capitalism is constant growth. Add to that the dedication to exploitation of natural resources as if those resources were unlimited. This system is breaking apart now. Holthaus argues in favor of a system that favors the welfare of all of us, not increasing the wealth of a very few, as the system currently supports.
Second, the middle part of the book is a message from the future that Holthaus has written about how we addressed the climate crisis 10 years, 20 years, and finally 30 years from now. Holthaus makes it clear that it’s too late to “fix” everything. Buying an electric car, for example, is just not enough. His message from the future tells us what mitigating factors we were able to implement (starting yesterday), although he’s clear that there is much we won’t be able to fix because it’s just too late. Reduction and mitigation, not elimination, are the goals. That’s the best we’ll be able to do because we waited way too long to even start.
Third, human mental health problems will increase. We’ve already seen the negative mental health effects of the covid pandemic with the increase in anxiety and depression that effect many aspects of our lives. Examples: two-thirds of us are having problems just getting a good night’s sleep; many of us developed health problems; and a lot of us are drinking a lot more alcohol than we should. And what about all these mass shootings we’re seeing? Holthaus does not speak about these mental health issues directly. Instead, he writes about grief and how to deal with it, how to connect to others to deal with our grief, and most of all, how to become grounded so we don’t just go nuts when faced with the challenge of the climate crisis.
Holthaus is not arguing for us to have hope. Instead, he’s an advocate of courage. We’re going to needs guts to get through what’s coming. Holthaus is asking us to have the courage to reinvent ourselves and our civilization now. He argues for “collective liberation” – tearing down the system to build something that works for everyone, not just a very few. He says, “We are in a moment of apocalypse. We cannot return to the world that was, because that world no longer exists. Instead, it is up to us to help bring a new world into being.”
Yes, that’s going to take a lot of courage.