“man against nature”: This is one of the archetypal “conflict narratives.” Other examples range from Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi.
the richest 10 percent: Oxfam, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2015, www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/mb-extreme-carbon-inequality-021215-en.pdf.
many on the Left: The argument is a pervasive one, in part because it is so persuasive, but has been made with special flair by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything and The Battle for Paradise; Jedediah Purdy in After Nature but perhaps more strikingly in his essays and exchanges published in Dissent; and of course Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital.
the socialist countries: History is not a much better guide, with Left industrialization during Stalin’s Five Year Plan or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or even Venezuela under Hugo Chávez not offering a more responsible approach than anything that was happening in the West.
The natural villains: Accounts of the bad behavior of oil companies abound, too, but two good places to start are Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010) and Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
a recent survey of movies: Peter Kareiva and Valerie Carranza, “Existential Risk Due to Ecosystem Collapse: Nature Strikes Back,” Futures, September 2018.
less than 40 percent: According to the IPCC, the figure is 35 percent: see IPCC, Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva, 2014).
world’s ten biggest oil companies: Claire Poole, “The World’s Largest Oil and Gas Companies 2018: Royal Dutch Shell Surpasses Exxon as Top Dog,” Forbes, June 6, 2018.
15 percent of the world’s emissions: According to the World Resources Institute, the figure was 14.36 percent in 2017: Johannes Friedrich, Mengpin Ge, and Andrew Pickens, “This Interactive Chart Explains World’s Top Ten Emitters, and How They’ve Changed,” World Resources Institute, April 11, 2017, www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-theyve-changed.
the story of nature and our relationship to it: In 1980, the art critic John Berger called modern zoos “an epitaph to a relationship that is as old as man”: “the zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.”
“Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture,” the legal scholar and environmentalist Jedediah Purdy wrote in “Thinking Like a Mountain” (n+1 29, Fall 2017), an essay on new forms of nature writing in the age of the Anthropocene. “It has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.” What he means is that we built a zoo out of nature, yes; but we live still inside those cages. “Alongside global domestication, an opposite and terrifying potential broods,” Purdy writes. “Every new superstorm, contagion, or annual heat record is pregnant with doom, most acutely for the world’s poor, but finally for nearly everyone. For all our deep and accelerating inequalities, life is less dangerous, and the natural world a more stable and fungible backdrop for human activity, than ever before. Yet the whole world also seems poised to come for us like a phalanx of piqued gods who have just switched sides.”
half of them extinct: E. O. Wilson made this prediction in a New York Times op-ed, “The Eight Million Species We Don’t Know,” published on March 3, 2018—and it echoes, conceptually, his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). According to the 2018 Living Planet report, prepared by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, world wildlife has already declined that much—in fact, by 60 percent, all since 1970.
Another such parable is bee death: I wrote a long magazine story about the phenomenon called “The Anxiety of Bees” (New York, June 17, 2015).
Flying insects might be disappearing: The 2017 study was published in PLOS One under the unwieldy title “More than 75 Percent Decline over 27 Years in Total Flying Insect Biomass in Protected Areas.” In 2018, a survey of insect populations in the rain forests of Puerto Rico was even more alarming—in fact, another researcher called their findings “hyperalarming.” Insects there have declined sixtyfold. (Bradford Lister and Andres Garcia, “Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 30, 2018.)
devoting whole feature articles: Jamie Lowe’s “The Super Bowl of Beekeeping” (The New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2018) is perhaps the most recent example. The original “fable of the bees” had a very different meaning: Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem of that name was an extended argument that public displays of virtue were invariably hypocritical and that the world was made a better place, in fact, the more ruthlessly individuals pursued their own “vices.” That the poem eventually became a touchstone of free-market thinking, and a major influence on Adam Smith, is all the more remarkable given that it first gained popularity in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble.
“designer climates”: “If geoengineering worked, whose hand would be on the thermostat?” asked Alan Robock in Science, in 2008. “How could the world agree on an optimal climate?” Ten years later, his student Ben Kravitz wrote, on the Harvard geoengineering program’s blog—yes, Harvard has a geoengineering program, and yes, they have a blog—“it may be possible to meet multiple, simultaneous objectives in the climate system.”
Twenty-two percent: Jakub Nowosad et al., “Global Assessment and Mapping of Changes in Mesoscale Landscapes: 1992–2015,” International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (October 2018).
Ninety-six percent: Yinon M. Bar-On et al., “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (June 2018).