After The Uninhabitable Earth

There are some books which really turn you around and as mentioned in the intro one of these for me was David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth.

The New York Magazine writer, and now New York Times Magazine writer as well, vividly paints a picture of an Earth where not the best case scenario plays out in terms of climate change but variations of the worst cases.

Now, in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, it seems like we may be moving into not a temporary lock down, but a new normal that is anything but normal, a long emergency with no end in sight.

How is one to react to this ultimate bleak seeming future, especially as a parent? While I do not interact with my daughter in Connecticut, I think about her future everyday, will her future play out in one of these almost apocalyptic scenarios Wallace-Wells paints?

I have gone through many emotions and actions, as I’ve repeatedly worked for more radical groups like Extinction Rebellion, to writing short cli-fi inspired stories, to changing my online presence to green, for example creating a website called Green Tech Writer.

I have read many other works since that cold winter holed up with The Uninhabitable Earth, befriended green activists and politicians, and became more vocal on the issue in everyday parlance, but I am stagnating right now as the deaths mount on account of Covid-19 while the issue of environmental collapse remains mostly sill hidden in large segments of the global discourse, especially with right wing politicians and their businessmen backers.

I do not consider myself a radical in any sense, while I do like to think of myself rather as a realist when it comes to the dangers of the two issues of the climate catastrophe and in my eyes the also, perhaps not in any way equal, but still catastrophic possibilities of technology concentration and the resulting possibilities of a techno-totalitarian world.

Indeed, I think these two issues feed off each other and present exactly the type of dystopian world I desperately hope Greta, and my daughter, and their descendants, will not have to grapple with.