The End of Eden

Reviews

A powerful warning about “the intimate ecological breakdowns” imperiling life on Earth . . . a requiem and a plea for mercy, made on behalf of the planet . . . [Welz] is a deft writer and a gifted natural historian. Welz’s elegy for the natural world will leave you marveling at the intricacies of animal adaptations over millenniums of evolution even as you mourn their rapid loss in the face of human culture. Welz’s study, which he conceived as an attempt to examine such disruptions ‘without turning myself to stone,’ amounts to a haunting warning. A book that fundamentally changes us as we read . . . Welz expertly weaves together a climate-breakdown education that combines objective scientific discourse with empathetic accounts of the lives and deaths of plants and animals across the globe. Eye-opening … A poignant elegy for creatures lost to climate change and a rigorous call to arms against further devastation. [A] beautifully rendered tour of a natural world on the brink. A climate change book for everyone . . . The insight and passion found in this book might help push us to really grasp and address climate breakdown. The world is not ours alone, and it's not only humans who suffer from our warping and degrading of it. Everything is changing now—a global transformation of horrible majesty. In his exquisite meditation, Adam Welz shows us how to see it—and feel it— in full. Climate change, Adam Welz shows, is already pushing many creatures toward oblivion, and its impacts are only going to grow. The End of Eden is at once an elegy and an exhortation—a plea to save what’s left of the Earth’s magnificent diversity. A book both celebratory and heartbreaking, Adam Welz revels in the marvels of life’s diversity and delivers a devastating account of ecological crisis. He brings climate breakdown’s effects on the more-than-human world to vivid life, revealing in the process the interconnectedness of all species. One of the great tricks the fossil fuel industry has pulled off in the last century is convincing the American public that 'nature' is something over there, separate from us. It is there only for us to extract value from, and thus respecting or wanting to protect nature, especially at the cost of profit, is something only out-of-touch elitists would do. Adam Welz blows this deeply entrenched narrative to pieces in a book that is as rigorously reported as it is beautifully written and, somehow, hopeful. Adam Welz is a first-class observer of the natural world, usually found with binoculars around his neck. He's also a first-class reporter on the science of our environmental predicaments. Together, these traits have allowed him to produce a book that goes deeper than any before into the meaning of the climate breakdown for all the rest of creation that shares this planet uneasily with us. Adam Welz has thrown a wonderfully wide net over the natural world, from birds to corals to mammals, in Europe, North America and Australia, to portray the array of life at risk in a rapidly warming world. He evokes wonder, which may well be the last arrow we have in the quiver to convince us to change our course. An eloquent, deeply informed account of the unfolding consequences of the climate crisis for all life on Earth. More than six decades after Silent Spring exposed the harms of chemical pesticides, Welz has written a Rachel Carson-esque account of a human-caused global force that threatens the future of all wild creatures. Expand reviews