Photo: Brian Mann | NPR
Naturalist Adam Welz’s new book, The End of Eden: Wild nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, portrays climate change as a growing network of sometimes surprising and hard to see breakdowns in the natural world, like invasive insects threatening northern forests because milder, shorter winters let them spread in devastating waves or bird species vanishing from deserts because it's too hot to forage for food or care for their young. Welz struggles with how to describe this "weirding" of nature without feeling despair, but notes that people and politicians can act to reduce use of fossil fuels and repair many of the world’s growing fractures. Efforts to protect forests and wetlands have made those areas far more resilient to climate change, he says, and such projects could ease the impact of climate-fueled events like the more intense fires, droughts and heat waves that are already reshaping our lives.
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