Thursday, 18 April 2019

Climate change: 'Losing Earth' @ Radio 4's Book of the Week

The BBC is taking climate change seriously:
Futures Forum: Climate change @ the BBC 
Futures Forum: BBC prioritises environment with new natural history programming

Next week's Book of the Week on Radio 4 looks at Nathaniel Rich's account of how climate change could have been halted thirty years ago:
BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Losing Earth

With the first episode on Monday: 

The Activist and the Scientist
Book of the Week


Losing Earth

Nathaniel Rich tells the story of how climate change could have been stopped in the 1980s and why it wasn't.

In 1979, the science of climate change was known – what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it.

In the US, over the next decade a variety of activists, scientists and politicians worked tirelessly to safeguard the environment but despite their efforts they couldn't.

Losing Earth is American novelist Nathaniel Rich’s account of the decade when the world came tantalizingly close to signing binding treaties that could have made a difference.

Read by Kyle Soller, the recipient of this year's Olivier award for best actor.


BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Losing Earth, The Activist and the Scientist

Earlier this month, NPR in the States interviewed Rich:
Futures Forum: Climate change: The book 'Losing Earth' explores how the oil industry played politics 

His book is based on his original article in the New York Times: 

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich
Photographs and Videos by George SteinmetzAUG. 1, 2018

Editor’s Note

This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. 


Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. 

With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. 

Jake Silverstein

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change - The New York Times

And, finally, here's an interview with him from last August:



“Losing Earth”: How Humanity Came to Understand Climate Change & Failed to Act in Time - YouTube
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