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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
Years ago, author David Wallace-Wells interviewed the alarmist climatologist Guy McPherson via Skype. A former conservation biologist at the University of Arizona, McPherson now lives in Belize with his partner, where he is awaiting the end of the world. McPherson believes that humanity will be extinct within ten years. A homesteader who coined the term “near-term human extinction,” McPherson is something of a grifter who leads New Age-style workshops about how to process the end of the world.
Wallace-Wells criticizes McPherson’s ethos as yet another excuse to retreat from politics and activism and blithely accept that there is nothing to be done in the face of warming. By listening too closely to people like McPherson, the book warns, humanity will be even less likely to take responsibility or pursue action in the face of climate change.
Themes
According to Wallace-Wells, McPherson’s prophecies are paranoid and based on misunderstandings of very basic climate research, but that doesn’t mean that, as warming seizes the planet, humanity won’t turn to figureheads like him. While this is problematic, Wallace-Wells does wonder why the rest of humanity isn’t thinking at least a little bit more apocalyptically. He predicts that soon, we will—but that this line of thought could tip into hysteria or even a perverse excitement about the end of civilization.
Humanity is drawn to the most dramatic, compelling conclusions—this is evident from how we consume media about the apocalypse excitedly and voraciously. So it stands to reason that humans would be more willing to listen to a problematic doomsday prophet than the measured advice of scientists and climatologists. But this is counterproductive and even dangerous: resigning ourselves to paranoid projections, rather than taking what actions we still can, will only continue to harm the planet.
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From the Book of Revelation to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, our culture makes it clear that humanity’s anxiety about the end of the world is intertwined with its deep-seated knowledge about “the fragility of its fabric.” Eco-nihilism and doomsday prophecies can easily take hold of a society that knows its own weaknesses—a society that has already come to see its understanding of itself as nothing but a cultural myth.
Unfortunately, the more we choose to reckon with the role humanity has played in the destruction of the world, the more hopeless and despairing people might become about having played that role. Accepting responsibility for the natural world should be an empowering, motivating stance—not one that drives people further into stultifying, inert self-pity.
Themes
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Climate disaster will surely inspire a number of new tendencies. Some people will withdraw from society, choosing to let nature run its course, while others will focus on building refuges to preserve humanity. Stoic, ascetic impulses, rooted in Buddhism and transcendentalism, are one answer—but hiding away from society is yet another way in which the human psyche reveals its inability to reckon with the reality of climate crisis.
Choosing to ignore society as warming runs its course is yet another despair mechanism in which inertia and inaction win out. This, of course, further harms the cause of action against climate change. While it might seem noble to try to detach oneself from society and accept the changes sweeping the Earth, this kind of withdrawal—especially if it becomes mainstream and popular, drawing in large masses of followers—is just another form of dangerous denial.
Themes
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Ecological nihilism, or eco-nihilism, on the other hand, is something to worry about. Unchecked, parts of society may grow into eco-fascism on the left or separatist movements on the right. At the center-left will be those who call for mass mobilization and collective action—“environmental pragmatists” rather than radicalized alarmists. But even that does not seem sufficient to address the scale of the issue, as global mobilization against climate change has been elusive so far.
It's difficult to predict what new sociopolitical movements will arise as a result of climate change, and when. But if there is no collective political action against climate change, the world risks eco-fascists and political radicals taking matters into their own hands and actually further derailing the collective fight against warming.
Themes
As environmental panic and despair grow throughout the world, motivating humanity toward fringe movements or nihilistic withdrawal, “political depression” also threatens to take hold and turn humanity into “zombies” who do little but shuffle toward oblivion. To snap humanity out of this stupor, many sociologists and cultural figures suggest that humanity must “un-blind [themselves] to human exceptionalism” rather than descend into “climate apathy” or a sense that humanity is receiving its just deserts.
There are many difficult balances to strike in the fight against climate change. The balance between hope and fear is one, as is the balance of measuring out the many tragic catch-22s we find ourselves in as we struggle for immediate answers to the problems warming represents. But perhaps the most careful balance to strike is the thin line between admitting collective complicity in warming’s trajectory and descending into self-loathing acceptance that the Earth is meting out payback. This stance threatens to halt potential action in the fight against climate change and create even more devastating consequences for all of humanity.
Themes
It will be difficult to watch the world descend into two or three or four degrees of warming without “crumbling collectively in despair.” But as history marches onward, it seems that normalizing climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it is the only way to remain in-the-moment and up to the task of facing down the ravages of a warming earth.
The complex directive the book outlines here suggests that as climate change worsens, humanity will have to find a way to continually remind ourselves of how bad things are—and how much worse they stand to become—so that we don’t succumb to hopelessness and despair.
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