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welz end eden wild nature age climate breakdown 2023

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Textbook in PDF format The End of Eden - Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz is a revelatory exploration of climate change from the perspective of wild species and natural ecosystems - an homage to the miraculous, vibrant entity that is life on Earth. It won the award of New Yorker Best Book of the Year. The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away. Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic. An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it’s too late. If Earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be about as thick as the apple’s skin. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in about 1760, humans have been performing an uncontrolled experiment on this fragile, life-giving cocoon. We’ve decided to burn incomprehensibly many gigatons of fossil fuels and spew their combusted remains into the air while simultaneously destroying millions of acres of forests, savannas, and prairies for industrial agriculture and ever-sprawling roads and cities, thus releasing even greater volumes of energy-trapping gases into the atmosphere. This is wreaking havoc on nature from the largest to the smallest scales. Extreme weather events are intensifying, megadroughts are afflicting vast regions for years, and megafires are burning up millions of acres with breathtaking speed. But species and ecosystems are also being eroded and rearranged more subtly as local microclimates shift and change, forcing smaller, less-noticed life forms to evolve, move away, or wither into extinction; these intimate ecological breakups and breakdowns are of no less consequence than the so-called natural disasters that generate dramatic headlines, and they’re happening all around us. We’re creating an all-penetrating phenomenon that is scrambling ecosystems and triggering cascades of chaos throughout the biosphere. It’s something like a monster from ancient Greek mythology that, as it embraces the world, sprouts thickets of writhing necks from which horrifying, sharp-toothed heads emerge. Looking into its faces can turn humans to stone. This is not the first time a miasma of this kind has enveloped our planet. Energy-trapping gas concentrations and global temperatures have spiked before during the four billion years of life on Earth: natural events like colossal, long-lasting volcanic eruptions and massive meteorite impacts have on a few rare occasions triggered huge climate shifts and devastating mass extinctions that are laid down hard in the fossil record.But the current rise is different: not only is it caused by humans but data indicate that gas concentrations are going up far faster than in any previous epoch. We’ve pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide from its natural level of about 280 parts per million to over 420 parts per million in just ten human generations, and we’re increasing it further still. There is now more CO2 in the air than there has been for at least three million years. Since our own species evolved into its current form about two hundred thousand years ago, this means that we’re creating an atmosphere profoundly unlike any we—and huge numbers of other species—have lived in before. We are making and breathing changed air. It’s also noteworthy that life achieved its peak of diversity about two hundred thousand years ago. Never did more different species live together on Earth than at the dawn of the human era. Our species emerged in an Eden—not the sanitized, fantastical Eden of religious books, but the most wondrous fabric of living things that our planet has ever been clothed in. “Climate change” is not my favorite term for the phenomenon at the center of this book, although I sometimes use it. For one thing, it’s contradictory: “climate,” as we learn about it in school, is constant and predictable, the antithesis of change. Placing these opposites together makes the term subconsciously feel meaningless or perfidious to many people. “Change” also implies reversability: that if the climate is changing, it can easily return to its previous state. This is misleading because many of the shifts and transformations that we have already observed are effectively irreversible and will become increasingly entrenched the longer harmful emissions continue. I think a term like “climate breakdown” better communicates the current situation. “Breakdown” acknowledges that climate is a type of definable pattern or structure that is breaking apart and not easily reassembled. Its cause—human activity—is well understood, and the word is serious and directional; it doesn’t refer to a random, temporary variation in the weather. “Global weirding” is another good one, as it conveys the novelty and strangeness of the climate crisis. Climate breakdown seldom operates alone: it isn’t the only force driving ecosystem collapses and species extinctions. Most of the damage we’re seeing is caused by it acting synergistically with other harmful outcomes of human activity, including pollution, habitat destruction, and invasive species. Climate breakdown can inflict further harm on ecosystems already damaged by other forces; it can amplify other forces’ impacts on the natural world. Contents Introduction Energy, Water & Time Plagues & Diseases Extreme Weather Morphing Migrations Fire Fertile Air Sea Change Stable / Unstable Conclusion Color Plates Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Index

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welz end eden wild nature age climate breakdown 2023

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