The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming
Written by Eric Holthaus
Narrated by Gary Tiedemann
4/5
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About this audiobook
The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.
The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.
- What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade?
- What could living in a city look like in 2030?
- How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States?
This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.
Eric Holthaus
Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
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Reviews for The Future Earth
42 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5You're better off reading "The Future We Choose" by Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, which is both realistic and inspiring. Honestly, even as someone with dreams for an eco-friendly future, I was not sure I could finish this book. Roughly halfway, he stops talking about the problems we face and pivots to future actions. And he's not wrong about any of what needs to happen to correct joint social and ecological issues, or about the fact that we do need to talk about solutions with a positive approach to making those happen. But from that point forward until the epilogue, he seems to use almost exclusively the narration style of a history lesson, talking about what happened in 2021 forward to 2050 as if it's the past, when the book was published in mid-2020. It's not even clear if some of his prose about 2020 is fact or fiction, and given the contentious election, it's a bit problematic.
I happen to like alt histories as fiction or futurism, but what he predicts for 2021-22 is just so immediately wildly pie-in-sky optimistic compared to what actually occurred, it feels fanciful or ridiculous as I read it in late 2022. Verging on foolish, given where things stood as he wrote. It does not make me feel happy or empowered to think about what he predicted for after that, because the ability to accomplish those goals would no doubt rest on previous societal achievements. Instead, I felt frustrated and sad at how little was improved, the opposite of his stated goal. I seriously hope that future readers don't take his wishful thinking about those 2 years as actual history, or they'll have a hard time understanding why their world is the way it is - maybe it requires an editors note or a new edition...
It's a lovely daydream. But since that is all it is at this time, even as a fellow daydreamer I have a hard time taking him seriously as a journalist or futurist after just a few pages of it. I remained skeptical and more than a little bitter for the remainder of the book. I did like his epilogue and the chapter on imagining at the end, but that's pretty much it.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved it. Very real and navigable. A real perspective and a lot of ideas.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5"The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused." A big giant lie.