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Part II, Chapter 1: Heat Death
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
Declining crop yields—and the hunger that results—are one of the many cascades that climate disaster may bring. As population increases, warming annihilates crop growth: by the end of the century, there could be 50% more people to feed, but over 50% less grain and protein with which to feed them. There is only a small swath of the world possessing the ideal growing temperatures, and climatologists’ older theories about carbon acting as a fertilizer to spur new plant growth have proven inaccurate. Increases in pests, fungus, disease, and flooding threaten crop yields worldwide.
Wallace-Wells suggests that the ways in which climate change stands to affect our methods of food production is one of its most insidious cascades. As the practical effects of climate disaster such as flood, drought, and pestilence make their ways through our climate systems, they reveal the structures humanity has put in place to reap from the natural world to be flimsy and untenable. We depend on the Earth to feed us, but the Earth needs us to be its stewards in order to continue sustaining us.
Themes
Bleak, fatalistic predictions by economists like Thomas Malthus (who believed that long-term economic growth was impossible in the face of population growth) are perhaps off-base—there is a “green revolution” underway, and undernourishment and extreme poverty have fallen massively in the last several decades. But many climatologists and scientists are still worried by the concept of “carrying capacity”—the rough number of how much population a given environment can support before it collapses. Global warming is only one factor in determining carrying capacity—war, inequality, and other humanitarian questions are all part of the equation.
The more people there are, the more food we must produce to feed them all around the world. Global warming is a direct threat to our available, arable land—and its social, political, and military effects will put even greater strain on our capacity to harness those resources. Wallace-Wells explains that while Malthus’s warnings about the necessities of population control were perhaps needlessly cutthroat, it’s true that even our current food production systems can only sustain so many. And as climate change’s cascades continue to impact the globe, there will be fewer and fewer places in which those food production systems can function.
Themes
As countries around the globe try to bring hundreds of millions of their citizens into the global middle class, however, the fact remains that the path there is fraught with “climate chaos.” Food production already accounts for a third of all carbon emissions—and while the world needs to cut its meat and dairy consumption in half by 2050 to avoid compounding climate disasters, the likelihood of this happening as Westernized consumption patterns boom is slim.
Ironically, the very mechanism by which humanity has come to sustain itself—mass industrialized food production—is contributing directly to warming in a number of ways. Changing the ways we eat and the things we consume is necessary, and it's just one of the ways climate change will forever change the face of our society.
Themes
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Ignorance and indifference contribute to the globe’s failure to adapt new methods of sustainable agriculture—John Steinbeck once said, “A crime is something someone else commits.”
Coming up with new ways of feeding ourselves is something we can certainly do—but first, we have to admit that the food systems we have in place make us complicit in our own destruction, and the destruction of the very planet we depend on for survival.
Themes
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Drought threatens food production just as seriously as heat. Much of the world’s arable land is rapidly transforming into desert. If the globe warms five or even three degrees, major regions of the world will be locked in perennial drought, worse even than the notorious American Dust Bowl. There are currently nearly one billion people who are undernourished or facing “hidden hunger” in the form of dietary deficiencies across the globe today, and warming will add to that number mightily.
This passage highlights how worsening climate systems will assault food production sites as the global population continues to rise. With fewer places to grow crops and raise livestock, less fertile ground to imbue the things we eat with nutrients, and more mouths to feed than ever, a global food shortage—or a “hidden” epidemic of nutritionally insufficient food—is all but guaranteed should we continue on our current course.
Themes
Some technological breakthroughs do promise solutions: soil-free startups, vertical farming, lab-grown meats, and other innovations could mean new ways of producing and consuming food. But the environment is saturated with carbohydrates—and further nutrient collapse threatens to put a strain on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Climate change threatens to transform the globe into an “empire of hunger.”
The alternative solutions to food production outlined here are well within reach. But like so much else associated with climate change, humanity needs to find the collective will to start putting these solutions in place right now if we are to prevent a planet that is motivated and transformed by human hunger.
Themes
