'The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didnt happen. Read it.' John Simpson
By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.
Nathaniel Richs groundbreaking account of that failure and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carsons Silent Spring and John Herseys Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.
In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did and didnt happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.
Recenzijos
As Nathaniel Rich observes nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held in 1979. His gripping, depressing, revelatory book makes it clear that not only is climate change a tragedy, but that it is also a crime a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That, I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and impossible to forgive. -- John Lanchester * New York Times * The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business & Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didnt happen. Read it. -- John Simpson (on Twitter) Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one. -- Jonathan Safran Foer [ Losing Earth] chronicles the failure of our scientific and political leaders to act to halt the climate apocalypse when they appeared on the verge of doing so, and casts the triumph of denial as the defining moral crisis for humankind. -- Philip Gourevitch Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age. -- Elizabeth Kolbert Rich demonstrates exquisitely how shallow debate of a deep problem the planetary scale and civilizational consequences of climate change exacerbates the problem. -- Stewart Brand A gripping piece of history . . . Rich's writing is compelling . . . Like a Greek tragedy, Losing Earth shows how close we came to making the right choices. * National Public Radio * Rich brilliantly relates the story of how, in 1979 . . . policymakers [ were alerted] to the existential threat, only to see climate treaties fail in a welter of profit over planet a decade later. An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved. * Nature *
Daugiau informacijos
The most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed, beautifully told: how we had the chance to stop climate change, and failed.
Introduction - i: Introduction Unit - ii: Part I: Shouts in the
Street:1979-1982
Chapter - 1: The Whole Banana: Spring 1979
Chapter - 2:
Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979
Chapter - 3: Between Clambake and Chaos: July 1979
Chapter - 4: Enter Cassandra, Raving: 1979-1980
Chapter - 5: A Very
Aggressive Defensive Program: 1979-1980
Chapter - 6: Tiger on the Road:
October 1980
Chapter - 7: A Deluge Most Unnatural: November 1980-September
1981
Chapter - 8: Heroes and Villains: March 1982
Chapter - 9: The Direction
of an Impending Catastrophe: 1982 Unit - iii: Part II: Bad Science Fiction:
1983-1988
Chapter - 10: Caution Not Panic: 1983-1984
Chapter - 11: The World
of Action: 1985
Chapter - 12: The Ozone in October: Fall 1985-Summer 1986
Chapter - 13: Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.: Fall 1987-Spring 1988
Unit - iv: Part III: You Will See Things That You Shall Believe: 1988-1989
Chapter - 14: Nothing but Bonfires: Summer 1988
Chapter - 15: Signal Weather:
June 1988
Chapter - 16: Woodstock for Climate Change: June 1988-April 1989
Chapter - 17: Fragmented World: Fall 1988
Chapter - 18: The Great Includer
and the Old Engineer: Spring 1989
Chapter - 19: Natural Processes: May 1989
Chapter - 20: The White House Effect: Fall 1989
Chapter - 21: Skunks at the
Garden Party: November 1989 Section - v: Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats
Section - vi: A Note on the Sources Acknowledgements - vii: Acknowledgements
Nathaniel Rich is the author of two previous novels, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayors Tongue, and a work of nonfiction, Losing Earth: A Recent History. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeneys, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and VICE, and he is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. He lives in New Orleans.
