American Scientist

THE END OF EDEN: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown. Adam Welz. 288 pp. Bloomsbury, 2023. $28.99.

We are doomed. We are screwed.

No, that’s too passive.

We have doomed and screwed ourselves, and we continue to do so.

That is often the message, or at least a core part of the message, of most climate books, even those books that warn us about succumbing to climate “doomism” or that throw in a small dose of hope, which is practically a genre requirement. There is a reason for this theme: The closer you look at climate disruption, and at the relative inaction of human governments in the face of our greatest existential threat, the more disheartening the situation seems.

The literature that has grown up around the enormous threat of climate change has too often followed a predictable script. The standard apocalyptic formula, from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah to the present, has always gone like this: Talk about the doom of the world, but then offer a reprieve. Yes, we are in deep dark trouble, but doom can be avoided if we do this. That is also the way of the modern climate jeremiad. Reform! And it is not uncommon in climate literature for this road to reform to be paved with bullet points.

The End of Eden by Adam Welz comes at climate doom from a different angle. Welz, a self-described “unfashionable old school naturalist,” writes with a quiet—even graceful—control, with a sense of humility and a sensibility and imagination that happily reaches beyond the human experience. He carefully describes the effects of seemingly small, and often, at least at first, unnoticeable changes brought about by climate disruption; changes that are causing the demise of a great variety of species, from cheetahs to Joshua trees to moose to ponderosa pines. Both the book’s biocentric rather than anthropocentric focus, as well as its thoughtful tone, distinguish it from many other climate books and earn it a unique place in the still-young and ever-evolving climate canon.

Welz starts each chapter with a contemporary set piece of an animal or plant in its particular habitat. His descriptions typically portray these beings as innocently trying to go about their business, as they have for millennia, only to find themselves undermined by devastating changes to their food sources, to the air and water around them, or even to their own bodies.

“A Cheetah lies still and low, eyes forward, in a mass of small, scrubby thorn trees, mostly Sicklebrush and Blackthorn, in the Otjozondjupa region of northern Namibia,” Welz begins one chapter. These detailed sections are obviously the product of a lifetime of observation and study, the writing finely wrought and explicit. After these introductions to our plant or animal protagonists, Welz presents the reader with the science behind the changes: not just a sketch of the science, but thorough explanations that, although they may hurt my liberal arts brain, provide accessible insight into what is occurring on our planet.

By deeply immersing readers in the lives of these plants and animals, Welz makes us feel what might be lost. As he describes the ways the intricate balance of the lives of these species can be unsettled, he implores us to see that not all threats are obvious. Again and again, we read about the smallest of changes that can beget the largest of consequences: decimation or even extinction.

Standing in a quiet, burned-out homesite overlooking the coastal town of Santa Barbara, California, six years after flames tore through this community in 2009, the sense of both terror and loss were still palpable.

Consider the red knot. These small gray birds undertake epic migrations from northern Siberia through Europe to mudflats on the coast along the western edge of North Africa. Not only have these birds honed their journeys over thousands of generations, they have evolved to change their bodies, breaking down their pectoral flight muscles and “growing a large gizzard, a stomach-like chamber in their digestive system that’s lined with muscles strong enough to crush mollusks.” If we were reading an old-school natural history text, we might nod our heads in wonder at this point. But we know what’s coming next: the inevitable turn. These birds “can’t easily reach the clams anymore because in northern Siberia, over five thousand miles away, the climate is changing fast.” With the Arctic warming three or four times faster than the rest of the globe, and therefore snowmelt happening earlier, the insects that the red knots feed on are peaking too early. The birds are becoming malnourished before their long migration, their numbers are plummeting, and, well, you know the rest. Nature’s clock, finely tuned over millions of years, is broken.

And so it goes with winter ticks on Maine’s moose, plummeting bird numbers in the ever-hotter and drier Mojave, and, horrifically, endangered parrots fleeing African wildfires with their tails aflame. If you tend to avoid this kind of information, I will say that one of the pleasures of the book is that despite the despair at the way things are falling apart, The End of Eden helps readers marvel at the way they were put together in the first place. Though this admiration, too, ultimately adds pain to the great loss.

Welz generally keeps out of the way of his story, but he steps forward in the book’s conclusion, describing how he came to devote his life to nature’s wonders and the difficulties of chronicling the destruction of the same. He then details the growth of human civilization throughout the Holocene, adding: “These massive advances were made possible by one key attribute of this epoch: climate stability.”

He continues:

[Our planet’s] richness and beauty is nothing short of a miracle, not a miracle created by an all-controlling God but one that emerged via the processes of energy and matter being shaped through evolution over billions of years. Now we’re ripping it up piece by piece, and tossing it in the trash with relentlessly increasing speed.

These are strong, impassioned words, and ones many people have heard before: the sort of words that, for all their sense and fire, seem to have little effect on our lawmakers. Although Welz sets out sane and sensible goals and describes how we might really be able to reduce carbon emissions and cool the planet’s fever, we also begin to hear something familiar: a sense of frustration and impotence. Maybe avoiding doomism is impossible when doom really is looming; maybe there are reasons that climate writing treads some familiar paths. In the end, almost all of the work in the genre is written in the spirit of Rachel Carson’s pre-climate-disruption classic, Silent Spring.

Welz’s is a quieter cry of doom, and that is what makes it truly stand out. The End of Eden has a restraint and humility to it, unlike any other climate book I have read, though one strange effect of this beautiful writing is that it is potentially more depressing than any apocalyptic screed. Welz has shown us both the intricate tapestry that evolution has woven, and the way it is so quickly unraveling.

As he writes in his final chapter, “The word that comes to mind is squander.”