YET ANOTHER BOOK about climate change. What could it possibly say that we haven’t already heard?
Plenty, it turns out.
David Wallace-Wells’ extraordinary and chilling book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming gives an overview of the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming and changing at rates never seen before. But the real value for its readers are the 100 brutal pages of excruciating details about what life will be like if they do not quickly make extraordinary changes to their energy consumption. Wallace-Wells’ central message is that we are living in a time hotter than any other time humans have ever lived in, and we cannot go back in our lifetimes. And looking forward is nothing short of terrifying.
A few of the admittedly people-focused impacts that will occur over the next century, if even moderate forecasts of global climate change come to be, include: extreme food and water shortages; hundreds of millions of climate refugees; a sixteenfold increase in Western American wildfires; the city of Jakarta—home to 10 million people—submerged; an unraveling of economic and political systems.
In many ways, the cold scientific facts are preferable. As Wallace-Wells says at the start of his book, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” He believes that “among the more profound questions being posed” by climate change is “how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another.”
By his own admission, he is using fear as a motivator for action: “The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective.” But will fear really motivate us to change? How do we find the courage and insight for the expansive global response that will be required? He doesn’t really say.
While Wallace-Wells does discuss a variety of possible political, economic, and ethical reactions to this existential crisis, he all but ignores the possibility that organized religion, let alone inner life, might have any impact at all. “We have not yet developed anything close to a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation,” he says. Is he right? Is climate change too big for our faith?
While there are many efforts in theological schools, congregations, and faith traditions across the globe to address global warming, we are not collectively cracking open our sacred stories and reimagining them for a time of unspeakable suffering. We are not consistently working together to find courage, spiritual sustenance, and wisdom for the transformations that will be necessary to confront and survive this planetary crisis.
Wallace-Wells is not without hope: “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair ... we are all its authors. And still writing.” Climate change is not an alien force or a natural disaster. It is our doing, and ours to undo.
Beth Norcross is the founding director of the Center for Spirituality in Nature in Arlington, Va., and is adjunct faculty at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.
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