Nathaniel Rich and Eric Holthaus - "Losing Earth: A Recent History" and "The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming" - Virtual Event

Nathaniel Rich and Eric Holthaus will discuss Losing Earth: A Recent History and The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming. They will be joined in conversation by Majora Carter.

Presented in partnership with Chicago Humanities Festival

Virtual event

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About the books: By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours. The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.

In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.

About the authors: Nathaniel Rich is the author of King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. Losing Earth is his latest book. Rich’s short fiction has been published by McSweeney’s, Vice, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the American Scholar. Rich served as Fiction Editor of the Paris Review between 2005 and 2010. Rich is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine; his essays on literature appear regularly in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He is the recipient of the 2017 Emily Clark Batch Prize for Fiction. Photo credit: Pableaux Johnson.

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. His latest book is The Future Earth.

About the interlocutor: Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation and successful implementation of numerous economic developments, technology & green-infrastructure projects, policies and job training & placement systems.