Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. But around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming.
This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, so that now it is too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out.
And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures, and what we can do now.
Because we don’t have to take this lying down.
Praise
“This is a provocative and sobering book, in which Hamilton shows very clearly that the climate problem is now primarily a question of social science: of psychology and political economy.”
Book of the Week, Times Higher Education Supplement
‘Hamilton’s book presents a powerful statement of the problems confronting us – not just the problem of climate change itself, but the tendency to wish the problem away by denial. Read this book.’
Professor Lord May OM AC FRS, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Clive Hamilton “makes an impeccable case for our inability or unwillingness to act rapidly enough to meet the challenge of the way our lifestyle is altering the very chemistry of the planet’s atmosphere.”
David Suzuki
“I am afraid Clive Hamilton has it right about climate change – deeply afraid. Requiem is a brave and seeringly honest book by a brilliant scholar. Ignoring him will only make a bad situation worse, so, please, read this book now.”
James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World, and Dean Emeritus, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
