SAVING EARTH

A caustic indictment of this country’s foot-dragging response to the threat of climate disaster, paired with a rising international chorus of younger voices raised in protest.

In the author’s view it’s no longer an impending threat: “Unfortunately, long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario.” In language as acerbic as the famously take-no-prisoners activist Greta Thunberg’s, Rhuday-Perkovich draws from Nathaniel Rich’s terrifying Losing Earth (2019) to point out evidence that scientists have been telling us what was in the atmospheric cards since the mid-1850s. She also traces the political failures—orchestrated in large part, she claims, by the petroleum industry’s lobbying organization, “ironically called the Global Climate Coalition”—that culminated in the disastrous policy reversals of the Trump administration. Readers will be jolted out of any sense of complacency through the inclusion of success stories like New York’s student-led Styrofoam Out of Schools initiative, quotes from Thunberg and dozens of other activists from numerous countries and cultures, descriptions of ways of coping with climate change anxiety, and too rarely made observations about how environmental issues are inextricably linked to issues of race, class, and gender. Foley, illustrator of the Epic Fails series, adds further sauce in caricature portraits ranging from President Donald Trump with fingers in his ears to climate heroes in spandex. Rich supplies an introduction.

Argues persuasively that it’s not going to be a pretty future—or much of a future at all—without drastic action soon.