THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT

Prominent writers reflect on the personal impact of climate change.

In focusing on how climatic shifts have been felt, mourned, and protested, this essay collection, edited by Brady and Isen, sketches an ecological transition point for humanity: a moment when older adults can recall a more secure past but not avoid confronting an increasingly ominous and insecure future. In “Faster Than We Thought,” Omar El Akkad offers a poignant consideration of how the Qatar of his youth is steadily becoming both unrecognizable and uninhabitable: “Sometime within the next century, stories of life in this place—the stories that constitute almost the entirety of my childhood—will sound, to new generations, like fiction. The tether between what is and what used to be, constantly stretching under the weight of history and progress, will not stretch any more. It will snap.” These essays investigate the myriad consequences of fast-developing, dramatic events, such as massive floods or powerful storms, and slower, more mundane happenings, such as incursions by invasive species and the gradual loss of land to rising sea levels. As the contributors make frighteningly clear, all these phenomena presage enormous challenges for life on Earth. Among the most powerful pieces are those that consider the intersection of scientific and spiritual assessments of climate change, as in Lacy M. Johnson’s “Come Hell,” a contemplation of how Christians in American farm country have reckoned with extreme and unpredictable weather; Rachel Riederer’s “Walking on Water,” which probes Indigenous responses to the construction of a giant dam, and the alarming disruptions to neighboring ecosystems, in Uganda; and Delia Falconer’s “Signs and Wonders,” an exploration of the complex dynamics of imaginative reactions to a biological apocalypse around the globe. Though there is a tilt toward American perspectives and many of the writers have a connection to New York City, overall, the book presents a diverse portrait of environmental awareness and distress.

A collection of testimonials, by turns disheartening and inspiring, on the radical climate transformations now well underway.