Green Series: David Wallace-Wells on The Uninhabitable Earth

The October Green Series speaker will be author David Wallace-Wells.

Wallace-Wells’s Number 1 New York Times bestselling The Uninhabitable Earth “hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon,” notes Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s.

A former National Fellow at New America, David Wallace-Wells is deputy editor of New York Magazine, where he also writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology, including his widely read and debated 2017 cover story on worst-case scenarios for global warming. The author of The Uninhabitable Earth, he was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.