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Losing Earth Nathaniel Rich

Losing Earth By Nathaniel Rich

Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich


$16.49
Condition - Very Good
8 in stock

Summary

The most urgent story of our times, brilliantly reframed, beautifully told: how we had the chance to stop climate change, and failed.

Losing Earth Summary

Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich

'The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn't happen. Read it.' John Simpson

By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change - what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.

Nathaniel Rich's groundbreaking account of that failure - and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and politicians committed to anti-scientific denialism - is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of the New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and John Hersey's Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.

In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did - and didn't - happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.

Losing Earth Reviews

As Nathaniel Rich observes "nearly every conversation we have in 2019 about climate change was being held
in 1979." His gripping, depressing, revelatory book makes it clear that not only is climate change a tragedy,
but that it is also a crime - a thing that bad people knowingly made worse, for their personal gain. That,
I suspect, is one of the many aspects to the climate change battle that posterity will find it hard to believe, and
impossible to forgive.

-- John Lanchester * New York Times *
The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business & Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn't happen. Read it. -- John Simpson (on Twitter)
Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
[Losing Earth] chronicles the failure of our scientific and political leaders to act to halt the climate apocalypse when they appeared on the verge of doing so, and casts the triumph of denial as the defining moral crisis for humankind. -- Philip Gourevitch
Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered. Losing Earth is an important contribution to the record of our heedless age. -- Elizabeth Kolbert
Rich demonstrates exquisitely how shallow debate of a deep problem - the planetary scale and civilizational consequences of climate change - exacerbates the problem. -- Stewart Brand
A gripping piece of history . . . Rich's writing is compelling . . . Like a Greek tragedy, Losing Earth shows how close we came to making the right choices. * National Public Radio *
Rich brilliantly relates the story of how, in 1979 . . . policymakers [were alerted] to the existential threat, only to see climate treaties fail in a welter of `profit over planet' a decade later. An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved. * Nature *

About Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich is the author of the novels Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor's Tongue. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and VICE, among other publications. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. Rich lives with his wife and son in New Orleans.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction - i: Introduction
  • Unit - ii: Part I: Shouts in the Street:1979-1982
  • Chapter - 1: The Whole Banana: Spring 1979
  • Chapter - 2: Mirror Worlds: Spring 1979
  • Chapter - 3: Between Clambake and Chaos: July 1979
  • Chapter - 4: Enter Cassandra, Raving: 1979-1980
  • Chapter - 5: A Very Aggressive Defensive Program: 1979-1980
  • Chapter - 6: Tiger on the Road: October 1980
  • Chapter - 7: A Deluge Most Unnatural: November 1980-September 1981
  • Chapter - 8: Heroes and Villains: March 1982
  • Chapter - 9: The Direction of an Impending Catastrophe: 1982
  • Unit - iii: Part II: Bad Science Fiction: 1983-1988
  • Chapter - 10: Caution Not Panic: 1983-1984
  • Chapter - 11: The World of Action: 1985
  • Chapter - 12: The Ozone in October: Fall 1985-Summer 1986
  • Chapter - 13: Atmospheric Scientist, New York, N.Y.: Fall 1987-Spring 1988
  • Unit - iv: Part III: You Will See Things That You Shall Believe: 1988-1989
  • Chapter - 14: Nothing but Bonfires: Summer 1988
  • Chapter - 15: Signal Weather: June 1988
  • Chapter - 16: Woodstock for Climate Change: June 1988-April 1989
  • Chapter - 17: Fragmented World: Fall 1988
  • Chapter - 18: The Great Includer and the Old Engineer: Spring 1989
  • Chapter - 19: Natural Processes: May 1989
  • Chapter - 20: The White House Effect: Fall 1989
  • Chapter - 21: Skunks at the Garden Party: November 1989
  • Section - v: Afterword: Glass-Bottomed Boats
    • Section - vi: A Note on the Sources
    • Acknowledgements - vii: Acknowledgements

Additional information

GOR009769743
9781529015829
1529015820
Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Pan Macmillan
2019-04-18
256
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Losing Earth