Nathaniel Rich (Author)
By 1979, we knew nearly everything
we understand today about climate change―including how to stop it. Over
the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists,
led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate,
escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late.
Losing Earth is their story, and ours.
The New York Times Magazine devoted
an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that
decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of
news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its
emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great
existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our
shared plight.
Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth
tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate
terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate
denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated
effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and
political influence. The book carries the story into the present day,
wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial
questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and
ourselves.
Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth
is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that
articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and
how we must go forward.
