The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

But conscious consumption and wellness are both cop-outs, arising from that basic promise extended by neoliberalism: that consumer choices can be a substitute for political action, advertising

not just political identity but political virtue; that the mutual end-goal of market and political forces should be the effective retirement of contentious politics at the hand of market consensus, which would displace ideological dispute; and that, in the meantime, in the supermarket aisle or department store, one can do good for the world simply by buying well.

It was total in other ways as well, unable to adjust to meaningfully discriminate between experiences as divergent as post-crash England and post-Maria Puerto Rico, or to concede its own shortcomings and paradoxes and blind spots, proposing instead only more neoliberalism. This is how the forces that unleashed climate change—namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market”—were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages.

Markets may be problematic, shall we say, but they also value security and stability and, all else being equal, reliable economic growth. In the form of that growth, neoliberalism promised a reward for cooperation, effectively transforming, at least in theory, what had once been seen as zero-sum competitions into positive-sum collaborations.

That epic era once derided as “prehistory” accounts for about 95 percent of human history. For nearly all of that time, humans traversed the planet but left no meaningful mark. Which makes the history of mark-making—the entire history of civilization, the entire history we know as history—look less like an inevitable crescendo than like an anomaly, or blip. And makes industrialization and economic growth, the two forces that really gave the modern world the hurtling sensation of material progress, a blip inside a blip. A blip inside a blip that has brought us to the brink of a never-ending climate catastrophe.