David Wallace-Wells In The Uninhabitable Earth

1)a) What is the the perspective of the author–is s/he a survivor? Someone who died at Jonestown? Someone
who left the movement? (b) What are the main points the author of the
document is trying to make and (c) Do you find their account believable? What makes a witness
reliable/unreliable? Could they be trustworthy in certain respects and not in others? Why/why not?

2)In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells writes, “This is climate’s kaleidoscope: we can be
mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly” (page 142). He adds, “When it
comes to climate parables, we tend to like best the ones starring animals, who are mute when we do not
project our voices onto them, and who are dying at our own hands – half of them extinct, E.O. Wilson
estimates, by 2100. Even as we face crippling impacts from climate on human life, we still look to those
animals, in part because what John Ruskin memorably called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ still holds: it can be curiously
easier to empathize with them, perhaps because we would rather not reckon with our own responsibility, but
instead simply feel their pain, at least briefly… [W]e seem most comfortable adopting a learned posture of
powerlessness” (page 150). Given current trends, not just our relationship to ‘nature’ but also to history and
politics and social organization will be forced to change. While the scale and details of these changes cannot
yet be known with any precision, we can begin to anticipate what lies ahead. What examples of Ruskin’s
‘pathetic fallacy’ and ‘learned powerlessness’ can you think of? What potential form or forms of changes to
history, politics, and social organization might you anticipate and why?

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