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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Uninhabitable Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cascades, Systems Crises, and Interconnectedness
Human Responsibility and the Natural World
Optimism and Action vs. Despair and Nihilism
The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity
Summary
Analysis
Since finishing this book in 2018, David Wallace-Wells has become slightly less optimistic. He’s watched humanity’s “only room” continue to fill with carbon and other toxic matter. The 2020 paperback edition of this book, which includes this newly-written Afterword, arrives in a different context than the original edition—the world has continued marching on, setting new and terrifying records as warming continues.
Even though David Wallace-Wells’s book exposed the horrors climate change threatens to bring if left unchecked, there hasn’t been any significant new action on the climate front in years. While many journalists, activists, and scientists are struggling to spread their messages of warning and keep hope alive, inaction continues to increase climate change’s threats.
Themes
Since the book’s publication, the UN has issued a “Doomsday” report outlining the need for mass global mobilization in the face of climate change. Climate activists’ messages of action and initiative have reached millions of people around the globe. Mass protests in the United States and the United Kingdom have put pressure on policymakers to “tell the truth” about the existential threat of climate change. Polls have showed that more Americans than ever believe in (and feel threatened by) warming. “Contemporary politics is now protest politics,” and the world’s radical anger is a good thing.
This passage provides a heartening glimpse into real, on-the-ground action taking place not just in the streets of the world’s capital but in the hearts and minds of everyday citizens. This kind of optimism in the face of uncertainty and fear is what’s necessary, the book posits. Even if the world’s governments are slow on the uptake, a politics of protest and demonstrative action is our best shot at bringing a deeper level of awareness to the issue of warming.
Themes
In spite of the social and political progress made in the last several years, history does not flow directly forward. Brazil’s policies threaten the Amazon basin, China’s investments in renewable energies have collapsed, and Canada has approved new oil pipelines. While individual hypocrisy in terms of climate action—taking international flights while buying organic, for instance—is forgivable, hypocrisy on the part of corporations and political leaders is not just unforgivable but unsustainable. Normalization is humanity’s greatest enemy.
Even though there’s a wider social awareness about the dangers of climate change than there ever has been before, inaction, and actions that actively worsen the warming situation, are still rampant on the political level. As the book has stated, profit-chasing is just as harmful to the cause of fighting climate change as despair. And until the world’s leaders, not just its citizens, start recognizing that, there will be no real progress in the fight to reduce emissions.
Themes
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California’s ever-worsening fire seasons are an example of normalization’s consequences. Many Californians simply refuse to see or internalize the horrors of worsening wildfires. In an interview with Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, Garcetti said that the “only thing that will stop [the fires] is when the Earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes.”
Here, Wallace-Wells spotlights Eric Garcetti’s words of hopelessness in the face of climate change in order to illustrate what must not happen on a global scale. Telling ourselves that when we’ve been washed away from the face of the Earth, the planet will still be able to heal is a fallacy. The planet, too, will be transformed by our continued ravages, and while certain parts of the natural world may recover on a long enough timeline, most of life as we know it—plant, human, and animal—will be forever lost.
Themes
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Humanity is likely to continue on this path of normalization, comforting ourselves in order to continue with daily life while ignoring the rapidly-worsening crisis unfolding at every level of society, with the most vulnerable suffering the most terribly. Unless the wealthy and comfortable can see their fates as intertwined with the imperiled and the destitute, no meaningful action will be taken. Still, David Wallace-Wells remains hopeful that there will be a call to collective action—even if he knows that this state of mind might make him seem “crazy, or better yet naïve.”
In this passage, it becomes clear that Wallace-Wells is choosing optimism—and encouraging his readers to do the same—because for him there’s literally no other option. Eco-nihilism, indifference, and inaction are, at this point, some of the greatest threats to the fight against climate change. Unless people like Wallace-Wells constantly affirm their commitment to optimism and action, the unthinkable may soon befall all of humanity.
Themes
