Let me take you on a tour of the end of the world…
No, no, you might say, I don’t want that: too depressing, I have my life to live after all. My things-to-do.
Well, consider taking a short break. Consider coming with me to places both beautiful and threatened. Yes, there will be more than a few dire facts about our warming world, and I will admit that during the year and a half of travel that constitutes this book, beginning with a visit to one abandoned capitol on the East Coast and culminating with a visit to another in the desert West, records were set for earliest storms, largest fires, latest first snowfall, hottest days, and an overall pace of catastrophe that makes your head spin, but I will also insist that, despite everything, our journey can still be kind of fun. Not hopeful mind you, that treacherous word I have come to regard warily, but fun.
How can that be, you may ask, given the times? I’m not sure. What can I say? It’s a strange and sloppy world.
But facing that world, and not running from it, has this virtue: it is honest. And I, and maybe you, want to see and try to remember this still-beautiful planet. Its trees, its birds, its waters, its dirt and grass. This is a core difference between an activists’ make up and an artists’. Of course I hope we will stop devouring fossil fuel like drunken gluttons and of course I hope we avoid the worst consequences of climate change. But at heart I am not as interested in saving the world as I am in singing it.
And yes I know that “end of the world” is overstatement. Life will go on in some form or another. Many will die but others will adapt. In the past I have always resisted the apocalyptic. It seems grandiose. I once wrote a book that specifically objected to other books with titles that began with “The End of…” or the “The Death of..” But, what if? What if we have really entered a new world? What if there is no hopeful plot twist at the end?
You will perhaps at least admit this: Life everywhere is suddenly more primal. Right? It is taking more and more work to ignore the fact that we seem to be in the midst an elemental comeuppance. During my travels I kept having the strange sense that I was living in the future, the same future that was predicted by scientists when I was younger but one that has arrived much faster than many of us expected. Time is strange; then becomes now. After years of debating climate change, we are inside it. Like many people of my generation, I first came to the idea of an altered future theoretically, through books like The End of Nature and films like An Inconvenient Truth. But while we may have already been at the end of nature, it always seemed to me that there was plenty of nature left, and back then it felt like they were talking about a time that was far away. It turned out we were wrong. It wasn’t far away. We are in it now. For my daughter and for many of my students, there is nothing theoretical about facing a world where the elements—fire, water, wind—have turned against us.
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About David Gessner
David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling, All the Wild That Remains, Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature and Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness.
About the book
It is here. Climate change is not off in the future, not a prediction that may or may not come true. We are in the midst of it and no one knows that better than David Gessner, who has spent the last twenty years reporting on the front lines of climate and the natural world, from the hurricanes in the South to the fires and drought in the intermountain West to the oil-threatened Gulf, in genre-breaking books that combine a passion for people, a deep love of nature, andopen-minded irreverence and humor that is all his own.
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