The Fragile Earth: Writings from The New Yorker on Climate Change by David Remnick

The Fragile Earth: Writings from The New Yorker on Climate Change Reviews

• 
  Numidica

  3.5 stars. In most ways, the essays presented here, which span over thirty years of New Yorker issues, are of historical interest rather than being sources of new and compelling information, at least for those who have been paying attention since 1988. I remember Dr. Hansen's testimony that year, and Elizabeth Kolbert makes reference to it as a sort of "where were you when" moment, like MLK assassination, or Challenger explosion. It's that way for me; I was sitting in the Texas Instruments technical library when I read, rather than watched Hansen's testimony.
  
  This book is too long, in my opinion. We know the glaciers are melting all over the world, so one essay on that subject is sufficient. Same for ocean acidification, extinction of land plants and animals due to climate zones shifting, same for desertification (though I found the essay on Africa's Great Green Wall fascinating). The message of this book, ultimately, is that there are no either / or choices; it's got to be all of the above, and as fast as we can do it if we want to survive. Sucking CO2 from the atmosphere does not mean we can keep driving fossil fuel powered cars. Maximizing solar and wind does not mean we don't also have to start building nuclear plants in lieu of gas or coal powered. We do not have time to try to fix economic inequality before we implement solutions - I know I think like an engineer, because I am one, but we don't have time for ratholes like that. We must reduce anything that produces greenhouse gases, including eating so much meat (looking at you, America), and we must do that starting right now.
  
  One of the essays is about "earth shading", what Elizabeth Kolbert calls the White Sky, whereby aerosol particles are injected into the stratosphere, just as Mount Pinatubo's eruption did, in order to reduce the heating of the Earth. Make no mistake, this will need to be done, so we'd better fund the engineering studies to figure how to do it, while not freezing the Earth. We will absolutely need the thirty years of coolish weather that approach can buy us. As one scientist said in that essay, no one would willingly accede to chemotherapy, except that, by the time the doctor proposes it, the matter has become about life and death. That's where we are today with regard to global warming.
• 
  Diogenes

  The New Yorker has been publishing articles on humankind’s impact upon the climate since Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring”essay of 1962, which became the bedrock of the environmental movement and lead to the first Earth Day in 1970. The Anthropocene is real—multinational corporations and governments have known it since the late-60s—and Gaia is suffering. But as George Carlson once said, “the planet is fine; people are f*cked.” Elizabeth Kolbert sums it all up in the Afterword:
  
  “What will the Earth look like thirty years from now? Yo a discomfiting extent, the future has already been written. There’s a great deal of inertia in the climate system; as a result, we’ve yet to experience the full effects of the CO2 that’s been emitted to date. No matter what happens during the next few decades, it’s pretty much guaranteed that glaciers and ice sheets will continue to melt, as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise.
  
  But to an extent that, depending on your perspective, is either heartening or horrifying the future—and not just of the next several decades but of the next several millennia—hinges on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood. What’s technically referred to as ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference wit the climate system’ and colloquially known as ‘catastrophe’ is warming so dramatic that it’s apt to obliterate whole nations (such as the Marshall Islands and the Maldives) and destroy entire ecosystems (such as coral reefs). A host of scientific studies suggest that a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or more would qualify. A great many studies suggest that warming of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would be enough to do the trick. At current emissions rates, the 1.5-degree threshold will be crossed in about a decade. As Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist at Duke University, told Science: ‘No longer can we say the window for action will close soon—we’re here now’” (pp. 531-2).
  
  The PSYOP campaigns to discredit the science are ongoing, and they are easily traceable to the greed machines of capitalism and fossil fuels, roping in politicians by the barrel-full, and suckering millions of the selfish and myopic and ignorant and gullible who love their big trucks and fair weather. Solutions, if any are undertaken, will not be cheap. Dreams of “zero-emissions” standards are just that, impossible. “Green” technologies are hardly waste- and carbon-free. Yet humankind must make incredible behavior changes as we continue to breed like rabbits and consume gluttonously. Even if tomorrow morning all fuel-combustion engines were silenced forever, the planet would still warm for another 50-80 years. Of course that’s not going to happen, but species-wide behavior change is not impossible. We do not miss the CFCs in our aerosols and we all wear our seat-belts now. Contingency plans, such a geoengineering endeavors, are being worked on and I have no doubt our governments and industries will not force behavior changes on populations. It will fall on Plan B battle-plans once the manure has hit the proverbial fan, and there too scientists and engineers will lead the way, not puppet politicians and Fox News pundits. But those contingency plans will only kick in after serious repercussions are felt by those in power. Until then, prepare for things to get progressively worse as the decades lurch on, and relocate uphill.
  
  Interestingly, W Ford Doolittle—a professor in biochemistry—wrote a captivating essay for Aeon recently (
  https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypot...), leaning towards James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s “Gais hypothesis” from the mid-70s, reckoning with the anthropomorphisization of the planet as a living organism in Darwinian terms. It’s a good philosophical read. Instead of kneeling to deaf gods with white beards and fantasizing about Elysian Fields in the afterlife while Capitalism dominates Christmas, humankind would be better off protecting and healing the natural world we’ve been so hell-bent on destroying for profit over the past 120 years. Our Elysian Fields are here on Earth. Our supreme deity is the very planet that has given us the formula for this aquarium of oxygen and fresh water, that has created the chemical nursery required for life to be born—from primordial ooze to the argentinosaurus to the sequoia to the red-tipped tube worm to the coronavirus to the hairy ape with a cell phone in his mitt. A serendipitous blessing in the vast murderous void of the universe, and one we're collectively pissing away as the Sixth Extinction accelerates.
  
  The editors of The New Yorker have put together a rich collection of previously published work here, which should convince many to invest further in their true journalism by getting subscriptions. You won’t be let down, and at the very least—thirty years from now—you can pull this from your shelf and show your grandchildren that yes, people were pushing for dire changes in the face of catastrophic possibilities. I most likely won’t be alive in thirty years, and I’m grateful for that. Many of you won’t be so lucky.
  
  Happy Festivus, everyone.
• 
  Tilly

  3.5 stars
  
  This was a really interesting book filled with over 20 articles from The New Yorker about climate change and related issues. I have worked for a climate change charity and keep up with news surrounding this area so I was interested to see how much I would find new and interesting.
  
  This is a long book! At 560 pages, I found that the 20+ articles were a few too many and that there was a decent amount of repetition. Infelt some articles could have been left out and that it would have been a better book.
  The Fragile Earth covers many different areas relatednto climate change including the science and history of climate change, effects on oceanic creatures, acidification of oceans and coral reefs, melting of ice caps, mass extinctions, carbon neutral power and carbon footprints and meat eating and the horrendous effects of the meat industry. There are a lot of case studies and each article has it's own focus.
  I really enjoyed reading about half of the articles and some I found rather monotonous and not needed. I personally didn't learn a great deal but still found the content to be interesting and useful to know.
  Some articles were written in a more approachable manner than others which makes a huge difference especially when many readers may not be that knowledgeable about climate change.
  I am unsure who the target market is for this book as I don't think those that know nothing about climate change should read this book as there are much better and more succinct books out there. For those that are already knowledgeable, there wasn't a huge amount of new information as all of the articles are written at least a decade ago.
  
  Overall, it was a decent read but too long and I wouldn't recommend this book as there are mich better climate change books to read.
  
  Please note that I was gifted this ebook in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Saachi

  Some notes about special articles I liked:
  
  The Climate Fixers- Michael Specter (2012)
  
  This was a fantastic piece of journalism. It was clearly put, deftly navigated a field where jargon is as plentiful as litter in the sea, and full of strange characters that highlighted the alive-ness of climate science in the present. I have to admit, I was a little bit put-down when I read the article because I had the exact same idea for a piece recently, in a nutshell, about natural climate solutions. I think there's still a lot more to be said on this front, but I think that given the people Specter included, it was an amazing vignette of the fractured field.
  
  At once, the science they (the scientists in the piece) suggest is grandiose beyond prediction (equivalent to blowing up a great number of manmade volcanoes type of insanity). Since I am actively studying the same scientific phenomena mentioned, it gave me an immense amount of appreciation for how simply Specter but those processes—it's no easy task. There was lots of imagery (such as the cubic mile metric) to understand the scale and numbers of the science. In a broad swept discussion of "why natural climate solutions" a scientist likens the approach to chemotherapy that is basically poison but is, for people suffering from cancer, "their only hope." So! Clear! And! Understandable! There are historical examples given that add shock factor—"in 2008, Chinese soldiers fired more than a thousand rockets filled with chemicals to prevent rain at the Olympics." We get a clear section pointing out that at this point, we can't just switch to renewables and expect everything to be fine. It's already at the point of no return, so we start to edge into the insane world of natural climate solutions. I really appreciated this section and how straight forward it was: To replace the energy we're using we would have to build a new atomic plant every week for fifty years or erect thousands of windmills each month. Spector made a really good point about why we need to stretch our imagination a bit and consider the strange and irresponsible world of this science. There's a really clear discussion at the end about accountability, who's going to make a move? All of this set the stage for why we might need the strange natural climate solutions that have long been written off as insane.
  
  The scientists he interviewed are painted with a pointilist quirkiness: here's a weird fact, here's another, hey did I tell you about how this scientist is crazy bonkers? We end up getting this weird pixelated group of characters that feel absurd. I don't think that this depiction is totally representative of the scientists' egos and souls, but is something Spector chose to do. They all, more or less, read like mad scientists cooking up weird solutions in the lab. This, I feel, that's a really attuned way to approach the field of natural climate solutions that require a certain amount of hubris. These characters first-hand demonstrate the really psychological insanity of science like this. Spector shows but doesn't tell in this regard.
  
  The Darkening Sea by Elizabeth Kolbert
  
  Beautifully accessible and simple, Kolbert is a master when it comes to this type of writing. I am complete awe at the lack of parentheticals and complications when it comes to difficult topics like these. Love how it lays out on the page.
• 
  Trenna

  Strong collection of essays. Many were excellent, with only a few exceptions, and even those were great. Maybe only one "pretty good" writing included. The topics were appropriately varied when considering the broad effects of the climate emergency, and the overall result was an impassioned, two-day reading on my end. Get yourself a copy.
• 
  Jimmy

  A must read. Quality essays as you would expect from The New Yorker.
• 
  Lily

  This rating is solely based on my own enjoyment of this anthology, and in no way reflects the quality of writing or material in these essays. Of course, given that this is a collection of New Yorker essays, the writing in all of them is great, they are well-researched, and generally have a nice balance between anecdotal and more fact-heavy. However, I'm not sure if this book is necessarily meant to be read cover to cover. It's extremely long, informationally dense at times, and at least in my own opinion, not the most engaging or captivating anthology. I saw this written in another review and found that I agree: the target audience for this novel is a little bit unclear. It's not fully fact-based, so it's not the most succinctly informative for someone looking to learn more about global warming, but I'm not sure if the perspectives are unique enough to present enough particularly new or groundbreaking information for someone who already has a baseline knowledge about global warming to be really worthwhile for someone only moderately interested in the topic. Overall, the novel seemed to lack a pointed purpose, other than organizing various climate-change-oriented essays into one place. Granted, this gripe can also be interpreted the other way, as the stories were so different from each other that they all offered a take on a different aspect of climate change and the way it affects society.
  There's no doubt these stories are important, and I liked the fact that they presented perspectives on climate change other than the ones we hear the most about, like just the rise in temperature, the depletion of the ozone, etc. I feel that most of my complaints could be avoided by reading this book in conjunction with maybe something more light-hearted or engaging, and so that you're not reading it from cover to cover all at once.
• 
  Chantal Lyons

  In a way, it's hard to put my thoughts about this book into words. I don't think I can do better than what the publisher has already said: this collection of essays is urgent. So very, very urgent.
  
  I've never read The New Yorker beyond the odd online article or two. So what an excellent idea this book is - to reach new audiences. I'd heard of writers/journalists like Bill McKibben, but to my shame, I'd never actually read his work. Now, while I may be the choir this book is preaching to, I still learned many new things; and I saw familiar things through new lenses.
  
  The book is actually a little hard-going at the beginning, and I think that's because the first two essays (by Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert) aren't particularly "grounded" - they don't focus on any particular events or places. That isn't to say they aren't powerful, and eloquently, passionately written. Yet I really hit my reading stride when the essays took me to far-away lands: a glacier in India, Inuits in Alaska, solar-power users in Tanzania, fire managers in California. Each of these essays captivated me. Many terrified me. In fact, this book has probably sealed my decision not to have a child. The thought of bringing a new person into this almost-certainly doomed world (as we know it) is unbearable.
  
  There is little comfort to be found in this book. If you're looking for cherry-picked optimism, try something like Gaia Vince's 'Adventures in the Anthropocene'. Reading 'The Fragile Earth', meanwhile, felt like bearing witness.
  
  (With thanks to William Collins and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review)
• 
  Chloe

  One might be tempted to describe this book as "thought-provoking," but that would be far too inane for a collection like this. This book gave me straight up climate disaster nightmares because the state of the world, the state of humans and the climate, is horrifying. Occasionally, the writers would offer a glimmer, ever so faint, of hope for the future of climate change, but mostly this stuff is pretty bleak. We are probably, definitely, really screwed and the number of (separate) essays that mocked the idea of American exceptionalism and ingenuity pulling us through any climate catastrophes is telling. It's kind of like maxing out a credit card and assuming future you will make the money up to pay it off, even though you don't have the means to right now? Seems like if it's not good personal finance advice, probably also not good climate change advice? There are some really good ideas here though and I liked how well-written each essay was. The ones about wildfires and animal agriculture were fascinating, as was the one about how New York City is actually the most efficient and feasibly environmentally-friendly way to accommodate 7 billion people. (Who knew??) Highly recommend this if you are looking for an informed, bone-chilling thrill.
• 
  Samantha

  Some essays were stronger than others, but they all offer a unique look at the subject of climate change. Bill McKibben's lengthy piece from the 80s might have been prescient for the day but it was sort of the least interesting of the lot now. (He wrote about his Manhattan apartment and the source of everything that powers it and flows into it.) My favourites of the lot were the ones written by Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes little human details into the most mundane of interviews, and Jonathan Franzen's piece about his cruise to Antarctica. He found a little tribe of people onboard who were more devoted to the cruise experience than the fragile ecology of the place they were about to see. Everyone contributed photos for a big slideshow at the end, and they'd all taken photos of each other having fun. Which is our entire problem, really.
• 
  June

  Essential collection of writing on climate change. These essays were published over a number of years in the New Yorker, but it's nice to have them all in one place. It starts with Bill McKibben's 1989 piece, "Reflections: The End of Nature," when carbon emissions and acid rain were not yet standard news fare. It concludes with articles from 2019 on meat alternatives and forest fires. In between there are interesting facts, human interest stories, wry humor, and heavy hearts.
  
  Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.
• 
  Giada Cortinovis

  Libro molto interessante, sono articoli pubblicati sul New Yorker che hanno come argomento il cambiamento climatico e tutte le ricerche derivate dagli anni ottanta fino ad ora.
• 
  Susan

  Some of my favorite contributors to 'The New Yorker' have been compiled within this book by David Remnick. It's a engaging, comprehensive read which I read over six days (long time for me) to digest the facts and challenges we are facing with climate changes. Excellent!
• 
  Trace Nichols

  Some highly intriguing stories in this compilation. One can't help but compare and contrast. There are definitely stories that are more interesting, thought-provoking, educational, and written in a style that is more engaging than others. It makes it difficult to read the stories that are basically outlines of facts, especially when you're reading it in Audible format. It might not have not been the intent of the editors for this book to have a target audience of audible listeners, but today that needs to be taken into consideration with the popularity of this reading format. The book does tackle a lot of direct and indirect effects of climate change. For instance, one favorite of mine was the story on veggie-meat products and the agricultural industry.
• 
  Brandon Pytel

  What a fantastic collection of stories. In books of essays or short stories, I typically mark the pieces that stood out as outstanding in the table of contents, but for this book, each piece resonated so much that I had trouble distinguishing them. Even Bill McKibben’s End of Nature, which I’ve read several times, read just as good on a reread.
  
  Divided into three sections — how we got here, where we are, and what we can do now — this book offers fantastic examinations of the climate emergency: its origins, its consequences, and the possibilities of mitigation and adaptation; or, in other words, its past, present, and future. Notably, the book brings to light the need for and importance of climate writing: “climate change isn’t an ‘issue’ to be considered among a list of others. Rather, it concerns the very preconditions for all species to go on living on this planet… [this book] contributes to a shared sense of urgency — and to a shared sense of change.”
  
  Like I mentioned, every essay in this collection is worth reading, but here are some that stand out: “Writes in the Storm,” where Kathryn Schulz explains the history of weather as both an empirical model and a symbolic one, with the science of meteorology slowly replacing the literary impact of its majesty; “The Inferno,” where Christine Keneally describes Black Saturday, a tale of fighting one of Australia’s worst fires in history and the now-complicated implications of the country’s “stay or go” policy.
  
  We also get a fantastic piece by Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World,” where the novelist goes to Antarctica to see a pristine landscape and a remote species, all within the frame of celebrating a relative’s memory and exploring the meaning of love within a dying world. And we get David Owen’s “Green Manhattan,” which dives into the eco-friendly lifestyle of urban spaces and made me rethink the preconceived notions of places like NYC as antitheses to environmental lifestyles and further enraged me on suburban sprawl and the modern American dream of mini-Monticellos, all made possible by the car and the infrastructure created to cater to it.
• 
  Lynn

  The New Yorker on Climate Change
  
  This is a collection of various articles by The New Yorker about Climate Change. It contains essays by Johnathan Franzen and other famous writers. The articles cover air, land and water ecosystems all over the world and how climate change is drastically changing it. Two I found very interesting are the receding glaciers in the Himalayas that endangers seven million people in the lowlands who depend on the water from the mountains. There’s also an article on the flooding during Hurricane Sandy in New York City.
• 
  Ryan Humphris

  My hope for this book was to get a beginner's course in climate change - both what has been reported over the past several decades but also the on the ground work that might not be widely known. In this respect, The Fragile Earth certainly delivered. As one would guess, it's hard, if not completely illogical, to be optimistic after reading this, but there were many worthwhile stories (some of which didn't even have climate change as the main focus necessarily). This is a collection I feel like I will draw from for some time.
• 
  Riccardo Lo Monaco

  Great collection of essays that appeared in the New Yorker. I don’t know why I don’t have a subscription to that magazine, any writer that I’ve ever read from them has been solid. This was a great read because half the time you don’t even realize it’s talking about climate change... but then BAM. Whether it’s penguins or politics, this collection does a great job of covering the breadth of effects that climate change is having on humans and the world we live in. Great read.
• 
  Marcy

  An amazing deep dive into climate change, from a series of New Yorker stories, ranging from penguins, wildfires, and desertification. This was fascinating to listen to, especially the earliest published stories, and to see how fast and far things have continued to progress and worsen. I don't see how some people would still doubt climate change's reality after listening to these stories. An excellent job by the New Yorker.
• 
  Miriam Carbó Amorós

  I really liked the idea of this book. Joining press articles and reports about climate change though different authors since the 18th century.
  But I missed the narrative and cohesiveness in between chapters. All this investigative reports (super interesting) did say a lot of the same things. I missed the story that brought them all together.
• 
  Sharon LaCrosse

  I loved this look of the sad progression our world's people have made on climate change. The articles show the diversity of authors who wrote for the NYTimes over the years, and into years to come, no doubt. A very important topic. Vital to life on our earth.
• 
  Claire

  What a great compendium of climate-related New Yorker pieces. Very well edited and put together.
• 
  Ceris Backstrom

  I really enjoyed most of these essays! This is a really fantastic and thoughtful collection.
• 
  Michelle Oag

  Such an amazing and informative book. I highly recommend.