Love in the Anthropocene

"What I really like about Dale and Bonnie’s book is that it’s about the human face. They’ve told us stories that help us imagine what it could be like living in an altered future where, essentially, there’s nothing left that isn’t built or controlled by humans. I think it’s a great book for helping us to think through what climate change could mean for our future and what kind of life we might be living in the future if we don’t get this situation under control. I think it’s a brilliant book to teach with or for a book group, because it’s such a good book to stimulate a conversation about why the authors have told these particular stories, why they they chose these stories to tell. All of the books I have chosen are about grappling with the meaning of climate change. This is something that scientists don’t like to talk about. In fact, its something they are not equipped to talk about because that’s not really what science is about and it’s not how scientists are trained to think or talk. And yet if we want people to take climate change seriously, they need to understand what it means. And I don’t just mean economically or in terms of hurricane intensification but what it means for our lives. That was the motivation that led Erik Conway and me to write The Collapse of Western Civilisation , to get a sense of what’s really at stake here and – again, like Roy’s book – how bad this could really be. In The Collapse of Western Civilisation we were trying to get at the political meaning, not just in the sense of climate change denial but what massively disruptive climate change could mean in terms of its threat to liberal democracy. So, all these books in different ways are getting at meaning."