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  • Losing Earth

  • A Recent History
  • Written by: Nathaniel Rich
  • Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
  • Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (12 ratings)

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Losing Earth

Written by: Nathaniel Rich
Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
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Publisher's Summary

"This is an important, infuriating, enlightening, engaging, and engrossing audiobook...Anyone wishing to learn how the world has gotten to the point of almost inevitable climate disaster will be well served by listening to Godfrey's measured but emphatic reading." — AudioFile Magazine

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—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, 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 audiobook 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 the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

©2019 Nathaniel Rich (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

What the critics say

"An eloquent science history, and an urgent eleventh-hour call to save what can be saved." —Barbara Kiser, Nature

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

“This deeply researched, deeply felt book is an essential addition to the canon of climate change literature. Others have documented where we are, and speculated about where we might be headed, but the story of how we got here is perhaps the most important one to be told, because it is both a cautionary tale and an unfinished one. Reading this book, I could not help but imagine my children one day reading a future edition, which will include the story of my generation's response to what we knew." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

What listeners say about Losing Earth

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