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Part II, Chapter 8: Unbreathable Air
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
Diseases that haven’t circulated in the planet’s air for millions of years are trapped in the Arctic ice—and as the ice melts, those diseases will be released back into the atmosphere. People’s immune systems will have no idea how to fight back against these ancient plagues. Even more recent diseases—namely the 1918 flu and the bubonic plague—threaten to thaw out and reenter the world. Though not all of these organisms will survive, there is precedent for their ability to do serious damage: in 2016, a boy in Russia was killed and 20 others were infected by anthrax released when a reindeer’s 75-year-old frozen carcass thawed out of the permafrost.
The release of new and old diseases into the atmosphere is yet another casualty of climate change. When most people think of climate crisis, they think of rising sea levels and rampant natural disasters—that is, dramatic, contained events that wash away life as we know it. But what this book suggests is that the most tragic and dangerous effects of a warming planet aren’t those that are the most explosive or obvious. Like air pollution and malnutrition, localized resurgences of old diseases are already happening all around the globe right now, affecting vulnerable individuals.
Themes
What is more frightening even than the release of ancient diseases is the migration of existing regional ones. Certain bugs (and thus certain maladies they carry) are only a threat in certain parts of the world, such as yellow fever in the Amazon and malaria and zika in other tropical regions. As the earth warms and temperatures shift, the bugs that carry these diseases can migrate northward and mutate. For example, since 2010, Lyme cases counts have increased in places like Japan and South Korea, where the disease had never before existed, and, in Minnesota in the 2000s, ticks dropped the moose population by more than 50 percent in a single decade.
Just as the locations of arable farmland and the paths of tornados and hurricanes shift as warming rewrites our weather maps, so too do the regions in which tropical diseases can thrive stand to shift. This passage is emblematic of how the interconnected systems of climate crisis feed off of one another in unexpected and often initially invisible ways.
Themes
The most uncertainty about new and emergent diseases is centered around the bacteria that live inside human bodies—more than 99 percent of which are unknown to science. Right now, most of the bacteria that lives inside the body is harmless, even helpful. But in May 2015, nearly two-thirds of the global population of the saiga, a small antelope native to central Asia, died in just a few days. The cause of death was a bacteria that lived inside the animal’s throat—during a heat wave, humidity triggered a bacterial response that killed a huge number of animals. The trigger of climate change, science suggests, could turn any number of bacteria living inside us into bullets.
By highlighting yet another invisible potential effect of rising temperatures, the book points out just how much we don’t know about the dormant enemies climate change stands to unleash upon the world. The larger implication is that without immediate action, there’s no telling what previously benign features of human life will suddenly become weaponized liabilities. Only in controlling warming now can we have a say in what new developments do or do not reach us by the end of the century. Animals are already suffering from mass die-offs like this one—and if humanity doesn’t recognize the interconnectedness of the human world and the natural world, we may all be headed for similar fates.
Themes
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