THE END OF EDEN

Detailed case studies of climate breakdown.

Attempting to fully comprehend the magnitude of global climate change can feel next to impossible. In this deeply researched and disturbing book, photographer and environmental writer Welz helps us understand it “through smaller stories.” Moving among far-flung ecosystems—e.g., the Mojave Desert, South Africa’s Cape Floral Region, the high-altitude grasslands of Central Asia—the author presents climate change in focused snapshots. Each case study of an ecosystem tracks how small increases in local temperature ripple through and cause damage. In New England, where cold winters once killed off most winter ticks, “a tiny increase in winter minimum temperatures” now helps ticks survive the cold months to infest and kill 90% of moose calves before they can reach adulthood. In the Kalahari, where average midday temperatures rose 3 degrees Celsius in the past decade, hornbills are lethally overheating as they try to gather food, unable to adequately feed themselves or their young. Through these eye-opening stories from around the world, Welz makes a vigorous, multifaceted case for acting against species extinction as the planet keeps warming. He is convincing in his arguments that plants and animals have intrinsic rights to exist; destroying biodiversity impoverishes the human experience of the world; and, because organisms on Earth have evolved remarkably wide-ranging adaptations, we can’t possibly anticipate how those that seem to have no "obvious use" to us now may become necessary to our survival as our environment changes. Reading this catalog of extinctions and near extinctions feels dismal, but Welz closes with energy and hope. “Dominant moral values and habits can shift over the span of a single generation,” writes the author, and fossil fuel interests are vulnerable. Though our failure as a species is possible, not acting at all makes it certain.

A poignant elegy for creatures lost to climate change and a rigorous call to arms against further devastation.