September Reading List; “Too Damn Hot”

If you like me had the misfortune of spending the Summer in Washington DC, you likely sweated a lake and found no relief. Even if your location was more fortunate, chances are good no matter where you are (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) you saw unexpected highs in your forecast. As I continue to think about what stories experience design can lend to the Climate Conversation, broadening my knowledge about the threats we face is helpful context, but the real mission is to find a way into the conversation that leaves an audience with a potential for meaningful transformation.

“The Heat Will Kill You First”

Jeff Goodell

To me, this was a strange reading experience. While the book moves quickly (Goodell certainly doesn’t opt for a slow burn here), and the human stories contained within are personal and often heartbreaking, I found myself again struggling with the “string-of-anecdotes-meets-travelog-meets-data-dump” format that is so often deployed for pop-science books.While Goodell’s detours into branding aren’t particularly interesting to me, what he does effectively is to delineate the many ways Heat is an ongoing and under-reported disaster that we’d do well to know a lot more about.

(for audiobook fans - you can definitely do this one at like 1.7 speed. Or just wait for me to read excerpts to you later this month, and then accelerate through those instead)

“Why Heat Waves Become Deadly”

The Carbon Copy, Canary Media

One of the points that Goodell underscores is that rising heat with further exacerbate existing inequalities. This episode of The Carbon Copy gives a great breakdown giving examples of how injuries from heat track cleanly along existing disparities and harmful institutions, like redlining. Of all the effects described, somehow that sharpening of inequality feels the easiest to grasp for me, and I find it sometimes helps guide me to an imagining of shifts in the larger world.

Bonus points for some discussions of good policies and responses here too - as a shameless city boy, hearing people talk about the simple changes that could keep city living viable brings comfort.

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions

Peter Brannen

I’ve spoken about this book before, but Brannen’s breakdown of the Permian–Triassic extinction event gets a shoutout in Goodell’s book, so I thought I’d page through again. The role that heat and changing climate played in Earth’s most severe extinction event complicated, but the results are certainly enough to grab the attention (as summarized from Wikipedia; “the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.” I think there’s something new and interesting in the scales and timelines of these massive die-offs, which forever alter the shape of life on Earth. I also think making them imaginable is a challenge maybe equal to making audiences grasp the future we are carving through climate change. Still, somewhere on the edges of these stories I feel like there’s an angle to be found for an experience.