RaveThe NationMy descriptions come nowhere near doing justice to [the contributors\'] stories and the power of their writing. You must read them and encounter their voices yourself ... I’ll admit that this anthology brought back visceral sensations and emotions that I sometimes fear I’ve grown too numbed by my daily consumption of climate news to feel anymore.
Nathaniel Rich
MixedThe Baffler... far from letting the industry and its political servants off the hook, the book...ends with a full-throated, fire-and-brimstone indictment of the carbon lobby and its ongoing denial and delaying tactics ... it looks like Rich got religion (so to speak) on this matter, if he didn’t have it all along, repeatedly quoting Pope Francis and going all jeremiad-like, writing something you’d expect more from such scourges of the industry as Naomi Klein or Bill McKibben, or, for that matter, me ... So, to be clear, I have much respect for Rich and his project here. Losing Earth is an important, useful, and commendable little book. But it still has, to my eye, certain puzzling gaps or blind spots in the way it’s framed and in some of the conclusions it reaches ... it’s odd that Rich essentially ignores the existence of the climate movement. Rich even calls for a popular campaign, fueled by moral outrage, to hold deniers and obstructionists accountable—as though the actually existing climate movement hasn’t already brought hundreds of thousands into the streets...and fundamentally shifted the debate around climate and the fossil-fuel industry in precisely the kind of moral terms Rich is advocating
Elizabeth Kolbert
PositiveThe Boston GlobeElizabeth Kolbert can be a very funny writer. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about her surprisingly breezy, entirely engrossing, and frequently entertaining tour through a half-billion years of the ups and precipitous downs of life on Earth (especially the downs) is Kolbert’s uncanny ability to induce smiles, snorts, and outright laughter as one reads about mass extinction, including humanity’s possible demise. It occurred to me at one point that if we do go the way of the ammonites and the mastodon, one of the human traits to disappear forever would be the capacity to crack wise in the face of oblivion ... Kolbert is a masterful, thought-provoking reporter. Her 2006 Field Notes from a Catastrophe is among the most important books on climate change, and she brings the same precision and intelligence to bear here. And yet there’s something missing that nags at me, a reticence about what happens to human beings in the Anthropocene — and the kind of radical change required if we’re to save ourselves ... What really matters, she argues, is that the sixth extinction will determine the course of life on Earth for all time. That perspective shift, reminiscent of a certain deep-green environmentalism, may not be antihuman, exactly, but its effect might well be inhumane. Because ecological destruction will cause — and is causing right now — incalculable human suffering. And I’m not ready to give up on another human capacity — for compassion, love of neighbor, solidarity. The urge to save each other may offer the only hope of limiting the damage we’re inflicting on everything else.
William T. Vollmann
PositiveThe BafflerHaving heard from coal miners and refinery workers, oil executives and nuclear engineers, fracking enthusiasts and carbon lobbyists, politicians and industry-captured regulators, residents of variously poisoned communities and even a few beleaguered activists—Vollmann beseeches his future reader to go easy on him and us. \'If you could end up saying, ‘well, yes, we might have made the same mistakes as you, if we’d been lucky enough to live when you did,’ I’d feel that Carbon Ideologies had accomplished some of its purpose,\' Vollmann writes. \'How you judge us can mean nothing to us who are dead, but to you it might mean something, to accept that we were not all monsters; and forgiveness benefits the forgiver, so why wouldn’t I prefer you to call our doings mistakes instead of crimes?\' But Vollmann suspects this is a bit much to ask. \'Most likely,\' he wearily admits, \'you are a hard, angry person...Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues...fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure? ... One of the enjoyable things about this massive work is the way Vollmann employs irony, and that bluntest implement of irony called sarcasm, throughout the volumes. He can be quite humorous. You might even call this the Infinite Jest of climate books.
