In general, the book says too little about what we can do to prevent this doomsday scenario from occurring. However, Wallace-Wells comes off as particularly insensitive about the impact of climate change on animals and other non-human lifeforms, even saying at one point that “the world could lose much of what we think of as nature, as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind.” Ultimately, his anthropocentric perspective is a missed opportunity to discuss just how dangerous climate change is for all living things, not just humanity. Given his background, it is not entirely surprising that he says little about how climate change will impact other species. In fact, he admits, he is “like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change,” and has only recently awoken to the horrific future humanity may have unwittingly created for itself. As he freely admits, he is not and never has been an environmentalist. He chooses to focus almost exclusively on what may happen to humanity once we go through the predicted 2 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming between now and 2100, which makes the scope of his work rather myopic for a work focused on the environment. Wallace-Wells’ scope is also quite narrow.
Some of his sentences take up nearly the whole page! His prose is not beautiful – it is unnecessarily arcane, and merely functional in that it serves the purpose of showing you how humanity is doomed, but is in no way memorable, fun or even easy to read. After a hundred or so pages (this book is over three hundred pages in total), it is easy to get tired of Wallace-Wells’ repetitive writing style. Many of Wallace-Wells’ paragraphs are long barrages of statistics and speculation. The Uninhabitable Earth, however, can be a dry read. You might also like: UN Warns of Famine Risk in Four Countries “The force of retribution will cascade down to us through nature, but the cost to nature is only one part of the story we will all be hurting.” “It is worse, much worse, than you think,” Wallace-Wells writes.
The opening chapter, “Cascades,” is particularly poignant, as it lays out exactly what is at stake if we do not take the steps to rectify the damage we have already wrecked upon the environment. Wallace-Wells’ facts are generally well-presented and laid out. This book also addresses why we, as a species, are so indifferent to climate change despite all the information we have about its disastrous consequences. Inspired by his 2017 New York Magazine article of the same name, Wallace-Wells’ book builds upon his previously established arguments, outlining how the future can still be salvaged despite the damage humanity has already done. David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming presents a terrifying prognosis for the future of our planet – that if things continue at the present pace, large parts of the planet will become uninhabitable by 2100.
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