The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

Climate change could soon mean that, in the fall, trees may simply turn brown, and so we will look differently at entire schools of painting, which stretched for generations, devoted to best capturing the oranges and reds we can no longer see ourselves out the windows of our cars as we drive along our highways. The coffee plants of Latin America will no longer produce fruit; beach homes will be built on higher and higher stilts and still be drowned. In many cases, it is better to use the present tense. In just the last forty years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, more than half of the world’s vertebrate animals have died; in just the last twenty-five, one study of German nature preserves found, the flying insect population declined by three-quarters. Species individuated over millions of years of evolution but forced together by climate change have begun to mate with one another for the first time, producing a whole new class of hybrid species: the pizzly bear, the coy-wolf. The zoos are already natural history museums, the children’s books already out of date.