David Wallace-Wells
About David Wallace-Wells
Speech topics
Surviving the World- Making the Best of a Burdened Planet
The impending climate crisis isn’t impending—it’s already here. There’s no going back, and all we can do is damage control to try to slow the rising temperatures: it’s a depressing thought, but true. How can we deal with a problem that possesses the speed, scope and severity of a disaster straight out of Greek mythology or Genesis? What can the generation who inherited this damaged planet do to keep it alive? Navigating the future and mitigating the consequences of the actions of irresponsible ancestors will be a challenge—but it’s something we can all face together.
In this talk, David Wallace-Wells draws on the findings in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, and explores the near-future we face in the wake of the climate crisis. Even though there will be difficult times ahead, there is still time to mitigate the effects of years of abusing our planet and, most importantly—there is still hope for a livable future for all. This is our story: everything we do now, or want to do, is affected by it, from the jobs we can have, where we can live, what we can eat and the pop culture we consume. Wallace-Wells knows that we’re not just watching this story unfold, we’re all the protagonists. The future is ours to write: the past might have provided the paper, but we hold the pen.
Speaking videos
Books by David Wallace-Wells
“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” (2019)
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon."—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday DemonIt is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousands of homes. Across the US, “500-year” storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.
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