The Uninhabitable Earth: Part III, Chapter 1: Storytelling Summary & Analysis

Human beings have told stories about the end of the world for thousands of years—yet when faced with scientists’ calls for us to pay attention to the Earth’s warning signals, it is difficult for humanity to reckon with the reality of apocalypse. David Wallace-Wells calls this effect “climate’s kaleidoscope”—the condition of being “mesmerized” and transfixed by the threat of Armageddon without actually ever perceiving it clearly.

People love when books, movies, and other forms of entertainment deal with apocalypse—but these stories often reinforce the idea that humanity can survive or surmount the challenge of climate crisis with little preparation or effort. In reality, the world will look and feel much different at two or three degrees of warming, and humanity will no longer have the luxury of enjoying these narratives from afar: they will be unfolding, everywhere, right before our eyes. No one will feel insulated from (or curious about) the impacts of climate change in a world that’s ravaged by escalating degrees of warming.

In reality, climate change is difficult to talk about because the narrative is hard to understand. There’s no real “evilness” in the story of climate change—humanity itself is the antagonist. In real climate narratives, there is only compounded complicity and shared responsibility in the global denial of what is happening to the Earth because of human greed.

Humanity’s conceptions of nature, too, are in for a change. The stories we tell about the natural world are often structured like dioramas—enclosed, distanced, and set up so that viewers can learn something from them. But we will soon no longer have to study nature closely to see the effects of a warming planet—nor will there be any time left to learn from what nature is telling humanity as reefs die, storms surge, and droughts spread.

Panic over plastic consumption and bee death are two other major climate “fables” that, it will soon be clear, say more about humanity’s desire to panic but remain inert than about our desire to actually preserve the earth. The idea that something will suddenly, swiftly wipe huge swaths of the Earth away—something beyond human control—is another way that humanity falls back on denial, inaction, and fatalism instead of turning to collective action and meaningful legislation. 

Sociologists and environmentalists refer to the current era as the “Anthropocene,” a term that suggests humans have so fully dominated the globe that weather, animal kingdoms, and plant life have all been transformed into things no longer truly “natural.” In fact, modern humanity hasn’t successfully “paved over” nature. Attempts to control what nature has in store by building seawalls, carbon-capture fields, and other climate-change repellants just underscore how impossible it is to remove nature from the picture. After all, Florida and Southern California, where people are making some of the most obvious attempts to control and reshape nature, will not endure by 2100. Humanity hasn’t defeated the environment at all—we have only given nature more ammunition, forcing it to spiral more quickly beyond control.

Even though scientists have known these facts for a long time, fears of being labeled “alarmist” have dogged their attempts to share their research. Media reporting on climate change has been called “climate porn.” Attempts to obscure the true threat of climate change have lulled humanity into inaction and denial, and even international conferences, treaties, and accords often seem like pure political theater: change isn’t happening fast enough, nor is it spreading far enough around the globe.

What has come to be known as “scientific reticence,” however, does have its uses. Scientists know that learning too much too fast about climate disaster can lead to burnout, panic, or further denial and inaction. Scientists don’t just shoulder the burden of predicting what comes next—they must strike the careful balance between hope and fear needed to motivate change. For decades, as scientists presented data, no one listened: in 2018, with the IPCC report about the effects of two degrees of warming, scientists at last leaned toward fear. Yet still no one listened, and many were left wondering what would make the globe wake up.