The Fragile Earth

Writings from The New Yorker on Climate Change

By: David Remnick - editor, Henry Finder - editor

Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith, Gabra Zackman, Cat Gould

Length: 18 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's Summary

A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book

One of the Daily Beast’s 5 Essential Books to Read Before the Election

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 listeners 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.

©2020 The New Yorker (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

It’s all about humans

The devastation of the biodiversity of Earth caused directly by humans written from the sympathetic view of how it will affect humans. Self-pitying blather.

it's depressing because it's true

This read is both disheartening and absolutely necessary. We (human beings) have known so much for so many years and yet we manged to waste decades chasing oil industry propaganda interested in protecting their revenues at the expenses of everyone's life.
The last few articles provide some information to keep our hopes up, but without aggressive actions, we can only hope that the future sequence of global catastrophes will avert the hot earth scenario and preserve life on the planet, with our without us.

PS I hope the international version of this book uses the metric system, I have downloaded in the US and the articles only report imperial measures. The more this collection of articles is distributed across nations, the better.