8th April 2025 – The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

“It’s worse, much worse, than you think.” 

When Wallace-Wells published this magazine article in July 2017, little would he have known it would become the New York magazine’s most read piece. This book, with the same title, is the longplay offspring, with over a 100 pages of footnotes, it’s clearly and importantly a very well researched work.

For a relatively short book, The Uninhabitable Earth covers a great deal of cursed ground – drought, floods, wildfires, economic crises, political instability, the collapse of the myth of progress – and reading it can feel like taking a hop-on hop-off tour of the future’s sprawling hellscape. It’s not without its hopeful notes: in a sense, none of this would even be worth talking about if there were nothing we could do about it.

The book, however, is less focused on solutions than on clarifying the scale of the problem, the horror of its effects. You could call it alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution.

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