The uninhabitable earth: a story of the future

Abstract

One need only flip through any leading foreign affairs publication to notice an uncomfortable human truth: we are obsessed with the stories of others' self-destruction. Millions of words have been penned re-examining the causes of past wars, conflicts, genocides or the decline of civilizations. This obsession with ruin is entrenched within the disciplines of political science and International Relations, where academics pick apart our societies' past conflicts using carefully articulated models and theoretical mechanisms. Feeling safe thanks to our distance from these historic calamities, we are blind to those evolving around us. In his new book, The uninhabitable earth, David Wallace-Wells tears off our collective blinkers and forces us to turn away from the past to face the world around, and just ahead, of us. By his description, it is a dark and dreadful sight. The book's focus is climate change, but that term seems inadequate to describe this sweeping tale of mass human and planetary wreckage. Climate change is a phenomenon, Wallace-Wells insists, that will be an ‘enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed’(p. 3). And it is high time that International Relations scholars started paying attention. To tell his tale, Wallace-Wells employs the terminology of war experts and military strategists and paints a bloody picture of a world under siege. The enemy we are fighting against is our own planet, ‘a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us’ (p. 20). The armies the planet possesses are those we have given it: vulnerable infrastructure, weapons and agricultural systems which disasters will quickly turn against us, wreaking further damage.

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