Our planetary home is haunted by a spectre, one becoming more incarnate by the day: the spectre of extinction. What would it mean, to rebel against this ‘fate’? To rebel against extinction? Here’s my take, as one of the many who has heard that call, inner as well as outer, to rebel: Surely it is to stand up against the extinctions that are happening right now. The sixth mass extinction, anthropogenic, that is taking out many many species every day; alongside the extinctions of much-needed ancient human wisdom cultures; and of biodiverse wild ecosystems. And to revolt against the prospect even of human extinction that comes with a business-as-usual trajectory.…

Naomi Klein writes in her call-to-arms book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the climate, that there are two types of climate change denial holding back effective action to protect our planet: denial of the problem and denial of the seriousness of the problem. While the first is thankfully rare in this country and can be easily dismissed as politically motivated head-in-the-sandism, the second is rife throughout society—from our politics to our media and, unless we are careful, in our universities. Academics must not allow this soft denialism into our institutions and onto our curriculums. Yet, we often do this when we fail to give students the full—and scary—information they need…

As a group of British academics and others who think and write about dangerous anthropogenic climate change, we have been impressed by your new book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. This already best-selling book, like the viral article in New York magazine from which it grew, states with passion and eloquence the hard truths of our current global plight. Far from being irresponsibly alarmist, as some have alleged, your straight look at oncoming disaster offers a vital stimulus to realistic understanding and action. We are so pleased that your book is receiving the mass attention it deserves, and is thereby making the very real risk of an…