Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change

Clive Hamilton offers a compelling description of a world transformed by climate change—and explains why we won’t stop climate change even though we know it will destroy us.

This book does not set out to raise the alarm again to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been many books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act.

This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth—our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature—and those that, in the end, have won out—our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures.