Episode 21: Nathaniel Rich

With the world leaders of the G20 having met about climate change last week and the upcoming United Nations climate summit happening in Scotland this week, we’re airing our conversation from a few months back with journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich, who began to more steadily research and write about the environment after moving with his wife to New Orleans a few years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. His sprawling cover story for The New York Times Magazine, “Losing Earth,” told about how American scientists had figured out the solutions to what is now the climate crisis in the late 1970s. The Reagan Revolution in 1980, however, and America's swing to the right, led to a suppression of sober conversations aimed at reducing fossil fuel use or human-driven environmental harm. Deregulation and rampant lobbying and corruption by the energy companies have plagued us for four decades since. Nothing was done then, and nothing has really been done since, as Greta Thunberg noted the other day in her blah-blah-blah, all-talk-and-no-action commentary after the G20 summit, highlighting the inability of our world leaders to act in meaningful ways—or act at all! Rich's most recent book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade (MCD/FSG), recollects and reworks for book publication, a large part of his journalism from the past decade. Rich has also published three novels (including one about climate change, Odds Against Tomorrow), and has a natural ear for dialogue. His research and writing chops are put to good use in this first nonfiction collection, covering everything from DuPont poisoning waterways (one of the stories in the book became the Todd Haynes film Dark Water) to kamikaze starfish to late-20th Century glow-in-the-dark rabbit experiments. Second Nature is essential reading for anyone who cares about the ecology (and the future) of the earth.