Center for the literary arts in New York State
“IT HITS YOU LIKE A COMET”
David Wallace-Wells
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
4:30 p.m. — Craft Talk / Q&A, the Campus Center West Boardroom
7:30 p.m. — Conversation, Campus Center West Auditorium
Moderated by Judith Enck, former EPA administrator and founder of Beyond Plastics.
David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019), a #1 New York Times bestseller, now available in a new 2023 Young Adult edition. The book argues that the state of the world, environmentally speaking, 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—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation.” Farhad Manjoo said, “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read,” and Andrew Solomon said it “hits you like a comet.”
In sobering detail, Wallace-Wells lays out the mistakes and inaction of past and current generations that we see negatively affecting all lives today and more importantly how they will inevitably affect the future. But readers will also hear—loud and clear—his impassioned call to action, as he appeals to current and future generations, especially young people. As he states: “the solutions, when we dare to imagine them . . . are indeed motivating, if there is to be any chance of preserving even the hope for a happier future—relatively livable, relatively fulfilling, relatively prosperous, and perhaps more than only relatively just.”
Wallace-Wells is a weekly columnist and staff writer for the New York Times, a national fellow at the New America Foundation, and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review.
Praise for The Uninhabitable Earth
“The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”— Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times
“Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”— The Economist
“Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”— Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”— The Washington Post
“The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books
Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Office of Sustainability, UAlbany Environmental Humanities Lab, and the Honors College at UAlbany.
(Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)