PanThe NationLike so many well-intentioned liberals, Foer individuates a collective problem ... While hardly a conservative ideologue, Foer can often sound like one ... What’s so unsettling and even tragic about Foer’s book is that his moralizing is illustrative of a broader self-flagellating despair among many liberals who are troubled by the ominous climate forecasts but who have absorbed right-wing nostrums that it’s a problem of our shared making ... Foer never makes it entirely clear how giving up yogurt and BLTs will lead to any significant change in the atmospheric temperature in the short time frame that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given us to mitigate climate catastrophe ... Not unlike his description of World War II, the picture that Foer paints of US agriculture is as the sum total of American consumer choices. But reality tells a different story ... therein lies the problem. For Foer, climate change is first and foremost an issue of personal morality, not corporate power ... There are a lot of missed opportunities in this book ... Foer ultimately gets bogged down by his climate anxieties and his painfully inchoate view of the problem he’s describing. For Foer, ultimately, the main culprit in the ongoing climate crisis is individual apathy ... readers get what they should expect: a novelist offering his inner thoughts to the world styled in the same brand of brooding supposed realism that allowed Foer and a whole generation of literary men to make their names in the late 1990s and early 2000.
David Wallace-Wells
PositiveBookforumThe horrors that ensue play out on a biblical scale, from heat death to plagues of warming to economic collapse ... Wallace-Wells plays the dutiful guide ... stitching dozens of interviews and decades of scientific research, much of it dry and cautious, into a vivid narrative of how our world might end ... The Uninhabitable Earth instead translates the bleak, abstract math of climate change—parts per million and half degrees Celsius—into its tangible effects on human life, filtering phenomena like coral bleaching through the lens of what they mean for ocean ecosystems and the people who depend on them ... While beautifully written, it never makes for easy reading ... Wallace-Wells is careful not to slip into nihilism ... The Uninhabitable Earth makes one of its few missteps when it uses an oddball crew of doomists to frame a discussion about ethics at the end of the world ... In the end, no collection of characters could do full justice to the range of human experience that rising temperatures will destabilize. Wallace-Wells rightly posits climate change as the basis for an entirely new political economy.
