Nathaniel Rich

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 book 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.

A Recent History

Losing Earth

While working for a financial consulting firm that offers insurance against catastrophic events, a young mathematician becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday scenarios until one of his worst-case scenarios unfolds in Manhattan.

A Novel

Odds Against Tomorrow

New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an ax murderer on the loose.

King Zeno

Follows the dual stories of two men, including young Eugene, a passionate reader who devotes himself to an adventurer writer, and elderly Mr. Schmitz, who in a series of increasingly ominous letters to a missing friend describes his growing desperation about his wife's deteriorating health. A first novel.

The Mayor's Tongue

From the author of Losing Earth, a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world that points the way to a new mode of ecological writing. We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity's clumsy signature. The old distinctions—between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact—have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation. In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories—obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported—point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known. From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost?It is, What world do we want to create in its place?

Scenes from a World Remade

Second Nature

Vom Mikroplastik in unseren Körpern über neu entfesselte Naturgewalten bis hin zur Erforschung der Unsterblichkeit: Nathaniel Richs Reportagen zeichnen ein eindrucksvolles Panorama unserer hochtechnisierten Welt. Wie unheilvoll menschliches Wirken und Natur miteinander verflochten sind, erleben wir, wenn Rich spannend wie in einer True-Crime-Novel von einem Dorf in den USA erzählt, das gegen einen Chemiekonzern und dabei buchstäblich um Leben und Tod kämpft. Weniger apokalyptisch und vielmehr futuristisch wirkt die Begegnung mit einem Fleischer aus Illinois, der sich als einer der Ersten auf die Züchtung von Laborfleisch verlegt hat. Und wie Science-Fiction wirkt die Geschichte eines weißen Hasen, der genetisch so verändert wurde, dass sein Fell im Dunkeln fluoresziert – was die Frage aufwirft, ob wir uns nicht schon längst, als Schöpfer der Natur, zu neuen Göttern aufgeschwungen haben. Nathaniel Rich führt uns fesselnd und mit großer erzählerischer Kraft eine Welt vor Augen, wie wir sie noch nicht gesehen haben – und die doch nichts ist als die pure Gegenwart.

Wie der Mensch die Natur für immer verändert

Die zweite Schöpfung

Už v roku 1979 sme o klimatickej zmene vedeli všetko, čo vieme dnes - vrátane toho, ako ju zastaviť.

Strácame zem 

An entertaining survey of film noir set in San Francisco covers The Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, D.O.A., Point Blank, The Conversation, Vertigo, and The Lady from Shanghai, among others.

Nathaniel Rich

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