Nathaniel Rich on Losing Earth

Copresented with Greenlight Books: Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking full-issue feature “Losing Earth: When We Almost Stopped Climate Change” in the New York Times Magazine—which has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Hersey’s Hiroshima and has been optioned for film—gave an account of the moment the US came tantalizingly close to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all, before the fossil fuels industry and the Republican Party fully committed to anti-scientific denialism. In his new book Losing Earth, Rich provides more of the context for what did—and didn’t—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 in 2019. 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. Rich presents his book with a reading and conversation, followed by a book signing. In collaboration with New York Times Live.