Nathaniel Rich - LOSING EARTH

Nathaniel Rich will be in conversation with Mimi Swartz for this event

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.

Nathaniel Rich is a writer-at-large at The New York Times Magazine, and a regular contributor to the Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. He is the author of three novels: King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He lives in New Orleans.

Mimi Swartz, is a senior executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine and a continuing Op-Ed writer for the New York Times. Previously, she was a staff writer at the New Yorker and the now defunct Talk Magazine. Overall, Swartz has worked at Texas Monthly for nearly thirty years. She is a two-time winner and four-time finalist of the National Magazine Award. Her work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. Her pieces have also been collected in Best American Political Writing, Best American Sportswriting, and The Stories We Tell, Classic True Tales by America’s Greatest Women Journalists. Swartz grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and now lives in Houston, with her husband John Wilburn. They have a son, Sam.