A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book
A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the
front lines of climate change--including writing from Bill McKibben,
Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more
Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a
Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had
ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless
consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published
a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it
could mean for the planet.
At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist;
read now, McKibben's work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New
Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the
causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now
find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face.
The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change--its past,
present, and future--taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains,
and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the
best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including
Bill McKibben's seminal essay "The End of Nature," the first piece to
popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general
audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as
well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier,
Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and
passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great
emergency of our age.
