ESCAPING NATURE

On the challenge of wrapping our heads around climate change—and actually doing something about it.

Pilkey, an earth scientist at Duke, and his contributors examine nearly every conceivable facet of how climate change is affecting life on Earth, emphasizing that it won’t just be human life that suffers. Yet humans are the chief culprits, and it’s up to humans to act, even as “we are not mentally equipped to prepare for a slow-moving abstraction like climate change that unfolds over decades and centuries.” It hardly helps that all the bad news about it has a numbing effect. Still, the author and his fellow contributors are confident that some positive action will ensue, since “we’ve been handed what is known in chess as a forced move.” There are paradoxical bits of good and bad news along the way: Flammable forest land area has declined by a quarter between 1983 and 2015, but only because so much forest has been swallowed up by farmland, and—bad news indeed—what we saw in the Lahaina conflagration of 2023 is likely to be repeated time and again: “urban firestorms…[that] will increase in scale and frequency, causing more death and destruction.” There are woes aplenty to report in these pages, but Pilkey and company offer ways in which readers can ameliorate them by taking viable steps such as establishing building codes that “require new houses to be made of fire-resistant materials”; outlawing water-intensive lawns in recognition that “drought and biodiversity loss have rendered the lawn aesthetic, especially as it is practiced in the United States, a hopelessly antiquated custom”; and making behavioral changes in daily life: “Eat more vegetables, drive less, and have fewer children....Stop building in areas at risk from wildfires, floods, sea level rise, storms, and so on.”

An eminently sensible user’s manual for saving the planet.