Catastrophic Myopia

摘要

There's a lot of climate change catastrophe in bookstores these days. Falter, by Bill McKibben. Losing Earth, by Nathaniel Rich. The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells. Three makes a trend. Something about the present moment, or at least the interest of enough authors, publishers, and readers, has produced a surge in writing about the climate apocalypse. These books cover similar territory, but they are not identical. To oversimplify the experience of reading them in succession, I found McKibben's dominated by a millenarianism of climate change as world-transformative; Rich's by a nostalgia for a past in which he imagines a few intrepid men could have stopped climate change in the 1980s; and Wallace-Wells's by a profound despair rooted in apocalyptic visions of a warmer future. What they have in common, however, is that they reduce all human and natural stories to one: humanity's carbon emissions. And ultimately, that's their flaw. To say that anthropogenic climate change touches everything is fair; to place it at the center of all the problems and conflicts confronting human society, as these volumes end up doing, is less helpful.