Desert Notebooks
A Road Map for the End of Time
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time.
Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.
In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nation columnist Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring) critiques notions of progress he sees as having brought civilization to the point of disaster in an erudite philosophical work about the prospect of climate change. Against the backdrop of his wanderings through the Mojave Desert and a bleakly rendered Las Vegas, he juxtaposes stories from indigenous cultures both of creation and of the devastating arrival of Westerners with explanations of how modern Western thought developed, such as the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, or of hourly pay during the Industrial Revolution. He also includes passages in which he reacts to the latest disturbing environmental and geopolitical news. The prose is at its best in the desert, where, for instance, "little jeweled crickets," dead and encrusted in salt, lay scattered in Death Valley. Coming upon a 12,000-year-old creosote bush prompts Ehrenreich to reflect that time might be understood "as a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off." Suggesting that humanity must go beyond "the stories that have been winning out these last two-hundred-and-change-years," Ehrenreich creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm. (July)
