I finished this over a month ago but we didn’t have our book club discussion about it until this week, and I was a little distressed by how much of the book I’d forgotten — one person in book club said that part of what the book does for him is that it arms him with counter-arguments and examples for conversations with climate deniers, which would be awesome, but apparently I have no memory for those kinds of specifics. Sigh. The main thing that stuck with me, meanwhile, is the central conceit: the observation that much writing about climate is aimed at inciting only a narrow range of feelings (anxiety, anger, despair) and to inhabit them uncritically. This book, instead, invites reflection on the broad spectrum of ways a person — particularly a scientist studying these phenomena — might feel, including wonder (at the workings of the planet, at what science can comprehend), or love. This reframing alone was worth the price of admission for me, even if I wasn’t always so engaged by the ways she approached the various feelings. Just the way it opened up this broader range of understanding — the simple realization that you can feel two different and even opposite emotions is more powerful than you might think, these days.
Also, Kate Marvel is a terrific writer. The prose is top-notch. There’s this one sentence that will live in my head forever: “The future remains uncertain, but I’m sending my children there and they are never coming back.” Boom. Mind blown.
An additional really excellent aspect of the book is the engagement with fictionalizing and literary texts, not just in the form of examples or case-studies — I think she even acknowledges the problem with treating fictional works as real-world evidence (it would be so cool if she did, I hope she did) — but also as a mode of thought, a tool to think with. Science taking literature seriously as a form of knowledge! Hallelujah!
Kasia Reads 