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A review by nghia
This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America by Jeff Nesbit
2.0
I abandoned this book around the 26% mark.
This book is an example of how a title sets expectations. I picked up this book specifically because the title seemed to promise something a bit different: not just stories about how climate change is happening in other places in the world but how it will directly affect Americans. And, even better, it seemed to promise to tie together how the things happening "over there" are related to (or will will soon lead to) things happening "in America".
I was hoping to find something would answer the question, "If the Great Barrier Reef dies off, why do Joe & Mary in Kansas care?"
So. That's what I was looking for. Based on the title.
Unfortunately, the book is really nothing like that. Instead all you get -- and why I eventually stopped reading it -- is a series of disconnected New Yorker style articles about various things changing due to (or, at least, exacerbated by) climate change, with no real explanation of how it ties back to America or would affect the day-to-day lives of Americans.
This becomes clear almost immediately in Chapter 3 when Nesbit starts talking about melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Sure, bad for people in the countries around there. But I picked up this book because I wanted to learn how it is "converging on America". Are the melting glaciers going to result in more migrants to America? Increase the price of wheat? What, exactly?
Nesbit does, occasionally, toss in off-handed details of how the changes affect Americans -- oyster die-offs in Oregon due to ocean acidification or a laughable claim about how "Alaska is critical to the national security of the United States" and the melting Arctic somehow(?) will threaten our national security -- but all too often his chapters are about the Sahel or the Great Barrier Reef with no effort to tie it back to America.
Even in the chapters where he does talk about America -- the early chapter on pollinators -- it is curiously devoid of impacts. He tells us that the rusty-patched bumblebee, "once the most common, recognizable type of bumblebee in much of America", is essentially gone. But Nesbit doesn't go the extra step and tell us how that's "end of the world" type stuff. The rusty-patched bumblebee had "disappeared entirely from the southeastern United States". So what's actual the impact? Are some crops not being fertilized? Do farmers have to pay extra to hire pollinators? The closest we get are fairly vague statements like "There are going to be increasing consequences" and "Everything falls apart if you take pollinators out of the game".
Except I came to this book to read the details of exactly those things. I thought I was going to get more in-depth analysis that the vague stuff you get from the thousands of easily accessible articles on pollinators or the Sahel or the Great Barrier Reef or the Himalayas or the Arctic. I thought I was to get something that draw a line from stuff happening far away to how it will directly impact the lives of Americans.
Eventually it became clear that the book I had been promised by the title isn't what is contained within the covers and that's why I stopped reading.
Who would be a good target for this book? I'm not actually sure. Maybe someone who is, somehow, on-the-fence about global warming or hasn't (somehow) heard much about the impacts. But I feel like you could also just Google up "top ten articles in 2018 about global warming" and get basically the same thing that way.
This book is an example of how a title sets expectations. I picked up this book specifically because the title seemed to promise something a bit different: not just stories about how climate change is happening in other places in the world but how it will directly affect Americans. And, even better, it seemed to promise to tie together how the things happening "over there" are related to (or will will soon lead to) things happening "in America".
I was hoping to find something would answer the question, "If the Great Barrier Reef dies off, why do Joe & Mary in Kansas care?"
So. That's what I was looking for. Based on the title.
Unfortunately, the book is really nothing like that. Instead all you get -- and why I eventually stopped reading it -- is a series of disconnected New Yorker style articles about various things changing due to (or, at least, exacerbated by) climate change, with no real explanation of how it ties back to America or would affect the day-to-day lives of Americans.
This becomes clear almost immediately in Chapter 3 when Nesbit starts talking about melting glaciers in the Himalayas. Sure, bad for people in the countries around there. But I picked up this book because I wanted to learn how it is "converging on America". Are the melting glaciers going to result in more migrants to America? Increase the price of wheat? What, exactly?
Nesbit does, occasionally, toss in off-handed details of how the changes affect Americans -- oyster die-offs in Oregon due to ocean acidification or a laughable claim about how "Alaska is critical to the national security of the United States" and the melting Arctic somehow(?) will threaten our national security -- but all too often his chapters are about the Sahel or the Great Barrier Reef with no effort to tie it back to America.
Even in the chapters where he does talk about America -- the early chapter on pollinators -- it is curiously devoid of impacts. He tells us that the rusty-patched bumblebee, "once the most common, recognizable type of bumblebee in much of America", is essentially gone. But Nesbit doesn't go the extra step and tell us how that's "end of the world" type stuff. The rusty-patched bumblebee had "disappeared entirely from the southeastern United States". So what's actual the impact? Are some crops not being fertilized? Do farmers have to pay extra to hire pollinators? The closest we get are fairly vague statements like "There are going to be increasing consequences" and "Everything falls apart if you take pollinators out of the game".
Except I came to this book to read the details of exactly those things. I thought I was going to get more in-depth analysis that the vague stuff you get from the thousands of easily accessible articles on pollinators or the Sahel or the Great Barrier Reef or the Himalayas or the Arctic. I thought I was to get something that draw a line from stuff happening far away to how it will directly impact the lives of Americans.
Eventually it became clear that the book I had been promised by the title isn't what is contained within the covers and that's why I stopped reading.
Who would be a good target for this book? I'm not actually sure. Maybe someone who is, somehow, on-the-fence about global warming or hasn't (somehow) heard much about the impacts. But I feel like you could also just Google up "top ten articles in 2018 about global warming" and get basically the same thing that way.