The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
- Nov 12, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
★★★☆☆
I’ve had Jeff Goodell's The Water Will Come on my reading list since it was published in 2017. I’d forgotten about that one when his latest, The Heat Will Kill You First, came out and an old friend gave it a rave five-star review that began, “First, let me state this is the most important book of the year, maybe the century so far.” So, naturally, I made this the next book on my list.
I don’t disagree with my friend’s review or rating. This is an important book. It’s a necessary book. It’s a book, however, like most, if not all, climate books, that will largely be read by people like me and, presumably, my friend, who are already aware of the science, believe in the science, know what needs to be done, and know that we’re unlikely to do it. But it’s a book written for people who aren’t me and my friend, and those people—all those people—should be reading this book right now. Maybe, just maybe, if everyone did read this book, we’d demand action—because the action we need is greater than the sum of each of our individual actions.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where one political party is trying to sour enough of the populous on the utility, the benefit—the necessity—of government to take action to protect us, not just militarily, but in a much more holistic way, by, amongst many other things, ensuring clean air, clean water, safe food, and a future that is livable not just for my generation, which has but perhaps another 50 years on this planet, but the ones after mine whose births have obligated us to ensuring a hospitable planet for them. If we don’t trust our government to take care of those things, or if we don’t have the power to solve those things ourselves, or if we’ve been convinced by one political party that what we’re seeing happening all around us environmentally—yes, the real-world impacts of climate change—is either not actually happening or may be happening, but if it is happening, it is not our fault and so there is nothing we can do about it, then what are we left with? We’re not left with much except, like gun violence in America, to accept it as the new reality, and live with the knowledge that one day we will die unnecessarily because there wasn’t the will to change.
But I digress. The Heat Will Kill You First did not hit me the way David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth did. The distinction between the two—the former feels more rudimentary, the latter more advanced—is at the core of my differing ratings (which I do feel slightly sheepish about), but, in reality, both are essential reading to anyone who lives on this planet and would like it to remain livable for the remainder of their lifetime, their childrens’ or grandchildrens’ lifetimes, or, for all the non-human beings who suffer and perish at our whim.
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