The Books Briefing: Peter Frankopan, Ed Yong
As the new ecological status quo emerges, well all need to rethink our place on the planet: Your weekly guide to the best in books For millennia, human society has been organized around the predictable march of the seasons: The weather has controlled what we eat, where we live, what we wear. But as the climate changes, the world we adapted to is being disrupted. In his new book, The Earth Transformed , Peter Frankopan tells the story of civilization through this lens, showing how people in the past responded to and were ruled by meteorological conditions. What the book ultimately reveals, Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote this week, is that were as foolish and catastrophically inattentive as any societyor global collection of societiesbefore us. The one difference is that we live in an era of dramatic, unprecedented warming caused by human activity. And the planets climate is not the only thing that has changed: Our loud, brightly lit modern way of life has drastic consequences for other species, Ed Yong writes in An Immense World . Light pollution disrupts birds; noise pollution upsets whales. As Tatiana Schlossberg pointed out last year, animals are dying and species are vanishing ; consequently, we can no longer predict what the world will look like when our children grow up. The books she reads to her young son mention kangaroos, crocodiles, and tigers. Will those creatures one day feel as fantastical as the fictional characters he loves, such as Custard the dragon? In literature, climate collapse used to be the province of speculative fiction. Today, its an unavoidable part of life, showing up in kitchen-sink dramas, comedies, and mysteries, as Heather Hansman notes . Writers have even begun to experiment with new ways to write about plants and animals . Elvia Wilks book Death by Landscape shows that this might be a good thing. Giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to nature, Michael Friedrich argues. As the new ecological status quo emerges, well all need to keep adjusting our expectations and rethinking our place on the planet. Every Friday in the Books Briefing , we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic . JOHN THYS / AFP / Getty; Museum of the City of New York / Getty A force that has shaped the history of the world The question is no longer whether climate change can influence the scale and force of an individual hurricane or typhoon. Of course it can. We see it happening as storms intensify all around us. Global warming is affecting nearly every Earth system, including polar-ice conditions, monsoon cycles, ocean temperature, and the dynamics of the major ocean currents and oscillations. Its bringing an end to what the poet Marianne Moore once called the unegoistic action of the glaciers. What use is history in this context? Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic How light and noise pollution confound animals senses We have instigated what some scientists have called an era of biological annihilation, comparable to the five great mass-extinction events of prehistory. But we have also filled the silence with noise and the night with light. This often ignored phenomenon is called sensory pollutionhuman-made stimuli that interfere with the senses of other species. By barraging different animals with stimuli of our own making, we have forced them to live in our Umwelt. We have distracted them from what they actually need to sense, drowned out the cues they depend upon, and lured them into sensory traps. Rop van Mierlo Will childrens books become catalogs of the extinct? Whales arent the only threatened storybook animals. We are going to lose Gorilla and Brown Bear, Brown Bear , says Hillary Young , a community ecologist and professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies our biodiversity crisis and is a mother of three. But were also losing Frog and Toad and the Very Hungry Caterpillar, because our loss of animal life is so deep and pervasive. Lori Nix As the climate changes, so does fiction The books below arent about climate changetheyre about immigration, corporate malfeasance, and tourism; they focus on families, neighbors, and friends. But in each, the anxieties of our warming age force their way in, simmering quietly in the background or erupting across the page. Internet Archive; Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic The way we talk about nature is getting weirder As we live through the Anthropocene, our current epoch of human-made disaster, a new book, Elvia Wilks Death by Landscape , argues compellingly that giving more space to the weird can help us reconsider our relationships to natureand, even in the face of institutional inertia, exercise greater responsibility to each other. About us: This weeks newsletter is written by Emma Sarappo . The book shes reading next is Idlewild , by James Frankie Thomas . Comments, questions, typos? Reply to this email to reach the Books Briefing team. Did you get this newsletter from a friend? Sign yourself up.