Losing Earth

A Vanity Fair Best Book of the Year: “Gripping . . . revelatory . . . Climate change is a tragedy, but Rich makes clear that it is also a crime.” —The New York Times Book Review

Finalist, PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

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 groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon sparking coverage and conversations around the world. Emphasizing the lives of those 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, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation, propaganda, and political influence. 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.

Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is that rare achievement: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

“Absorbing . . . a well-told tale.” —Newsday

“How to explain the mess we’re in? Nathaniel Rich recounts how a crucial decade was squandered . . . an important contribution to the record of our heedless age.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction