David Remnick - The Fragile Earth: Writing from The New Yorker on Climate Change

All pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker. The publication date is given at the beginning of each piece.

What does the greenhouse effect mean for us?

Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice.

What carbon emissions are doing to our oceans.

How weather went from symbol to science and back again.

Measuring the disappearance of a Himalayan glacier.

Can Alaskas whale hunters protect the waters they fish in?

There have been five great die-offs in history. This time, the cataclysm is us.

The fate of the Adlie penguin.

How Australia reckoned with the worst wildfires in its history.

What I saw on my journey to Antarctica.

Warfare, climate change, and extreme hunger converge in Chad.

When warnings went ignored, the prairies went up in flames.

With the earth at risk of growing uninhabitable, the assault on facts continues.

Everywhere should be more like New York.

Making eco-friendly choices is more complicated than it seems.

Can a wall of trees stop the Sahara from spreading?

Is there a technological solution to global warming?

How can cities be climate-proofed?

American startups compete to bring electricity to Africa.

Saving the world by inventing a better burger.

A new plan to solve Californias forest-fire problem.

I n the nineteen-eighties, a writer named Bill McKibben was regarded around The New Yorker office as something of a prodigy. The pieces in the Talk of the Town section in those days were unsigned, but everyone at 25 West Forty-third Street knew that McKibben was often writing half of them, sometimes more. Still in his twenties, he went wherever William Shawn, the editor of the magazine, sent himto trade shows, ballgames, political rallies, the piersand, in no time at all, he returned to the office and bashed out something charming or funny or sharp. Some writers in that era did not know what to make of him. McKibben had the laconic bearing of an Episcopal novitiate but worked with the metabolism of a hummingbird. And, as addicted as he had become to turning out his metropolitan dispatches on a snug weekly deadline, he was also eager to write something longer, more deeply reasoned, more far-flung. He had a particular passion for environmental matters and was a devoted reader of Henry David Thoreau and John Burroughs, Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson. Perhaps hed do something in that mode. After giving the matter considerable thought, he approached Shawn with a proposal.

Can I write about my apartment? he asked.

What McKibben had in mind was rather high-concept. He lived in a nothing-special apartment at Bleecker Street and Broadway. What would he learn, he wondered, if he followed every pipe and wire and chute that connected his apartment to the greater world to see where it all led? Where exactly did his water and electricity come from? Where did all his coffee grounds and apple cores go?

With a notebook and a credit card, McKibben flew off to Brazil to see where Con Edison was getting its oil. He visited the La Grande hydroelectric dams in subarctic Quebec; water flowed from there into the James Bay, into the Hudson Bay, and, eventually, into Bill McKibbens faucet. He saw uranium being extracted at the Hack Canyon mine, in Arizonaand eventually brought to the Indian Point nuclear power plant, the better to provide electricity for the lights and air-conditioners at Bleecker and Broadway. McKibbens essay on the exploitation of nature and its resources, titled Apartment, ran in the March 17, 1986, issue of the magazine.

An important outcome of that piece, for its author, was that it suggested further work. Apartment had the effect of reminding me, or maybe teaching me for the first time, that the world was physical, McKibben tells me. Somehow, I became attuned to the idea that the world and human arrangements were more vulnerable than I had ever thought. I could see what these lifelines looked like. And, at that moment, I also started reading the emerging literature of climate science.

One voice in particular stood out. In June, 1988, James Hansen, a scientist best known in his early career for the study of Venus and its atmospheric conditions, came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, and that the chief cause was our heedless consumption of fossil fuels. This warming, he said, was intensifying all the time and would soon lead to rising sea levels and extreme weather conditionspowerful hurricanes, ruinous droughts and fires and floods. It would unavoidably threaten natural systems and the social order.

McKibben was paying attention. The next year, he published a long, scrupulously reported, yet meditative piece of writing on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. It was called Reflections: The End of Nature, and it was the first truly extensive exploration of climate change in the nonscientific press. At the time, some people viewed the piece as exceedingly pious and comically apocalyptic. Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harpers Magazine, wrote: The End of Nature plays to the superstitions of the environmental left. The author, a young man of sensibility named Bill McKibben, strives for sanctimonious effect that is earnest, doom-ridden, precious, and tear-stained.

Still, the charges levelled against McKibbenof self-righteousness, fear-mongering, exaggerationdid not yet come from more organized and ominous forces. The oil-and-gas industry and right-wing, anti-environmentalist groups would eventually mobilize in an effort to discredit the work of writers like McKibben. Young men with video cameras would try to capture him in acts of hypocrisy, like getting into his car. He would be on the receiving end of death threats. But all of that came later.

When The End of Nature first appeared, it felt like speculative literature. The more alarming signs of climate changemelting ice sheets, species disappearing by the thousandswere not yet a matter of constant coverage in the press. Which makes it all the more remarkable that McKibben managed to bring both the science and the politics to a general audience. No corner of the earth, he made plain, could now be considered wild; everything, every ecosystem, was affected by human civilization. He studied the ramifications of a global crisis precipitated by the awesome power of Man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born. McKibbens classic essay was, in effect, an echo of James Hansens lonely testimony, the beginning of the literature on climate change.

THE NEW YORKER HAS A LONG TRADITION OF PUBLISHING PIECES about the natural world and its vulnerability, among them Rachel Carsons The Sea (1951) and Silent Spring (1962), John McPhees Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), and Jonathan Schells The Fate of the Earth (1982). Carsons work had a distinct political impact, changing the national mind-set about the dangers of pesticides. McPhees work explored the clashing values of those who sought to protect the environment and those who sought to exploit it. Schell dramatized, at the height of the Cold War, the costs to the earth of nuclear conflict. What this anthology aims to represent is the magazines efforts, over the past three decades, to examine what is now referred to as the climate emergencyits explanation and origins; the conditions it has already created; the likely consequences if we go on as we have; and (with some measure of hope) the possibilities of mitigation or adaptation.

In the worst sense, we have come a long way since The End of Nature. If McKibben presaged a speculative dystopia, we now live in its opening chapters. In the intervening years, the worlds governments have done precious little of the work and the cordination needed to ease the overheating of the atmosphere. The oil companies have conspired to buy off opposition through vast lobbying efforts in Washington and around the world. Awareness of climate change has certainly intensified, but, so far, with little to show by way of reform or results.