David Foster Wallace was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British journalist, author, and environmental and political activist. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and has written several books.
Doomer and, by extension, doomerism, are terms which arose primarily on the Internet to describe people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, ecological overshoot, pollution, nuclear weapons, and runaway artificial intelligence. Some doomers assert that there is a possibility these problems will bring about human extinction.
Joseph J. Romm is an American researcher, author, editor, physicist and climate expert, who advocates reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming and increasing energy security through energy efficiency and green energy technologies. Romm is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2009, Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America", and Time magazine named him one of its "Heroes of the Environment (2009)", calling him "The Web's most influential climate-change blogger".
References to climate change in popular culture have existed since the late 20th century and increased in the 21st century. Climate change, its impacts, and related human-environment interactions have been featured in nonfiction books and documentaries, but also literature, film, music, television shows and video games.
Jeff Goodell is an American author of seven non-fiction books and a longtime contributing writer to Rolling Stone. Goodell's writings are known for a focus on energy and environmental issues. He is Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
David Gessner is an American essayist, memoirist, nature writer, editor, and cartoonist.
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life is an essay by David Foster Wallace. The text originates from a commencement speech Wallace gave at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005. The essay was published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 and in 2009 its format was stretched by Little, Brown and Company to fill 138 pages for a book publication. A transcript of the speech circulated online as early as June 2005.
David George Haskell is a British and American biologist, writer, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction. In addition to scientific papers, he has written essays, poems, op-eds, and the books The Forest Unseen, The Songs of Trees, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, and Sounds Wild and Broken.
Mark Adam Hyman is an American physician and author. He is the founder and medical director of The UltraWellness Center and was a columnist for The Huffington Post. Hyman was a regular contributor to the Katie Couric Show until the show's cancellation in 2013. He writes a blog called The Doctor’s Farmacy, which examines many topics related to human health and welfare. He is the author of several books on nutrition and longevity, including Food Fix, Eat Fat, Get Thin, and Young Forever.
Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist and climate journalist. He is the founder of a weather service called Currently and started a publication called The Phoenix on Ghost. He was formerly a writer for The Correspondent, Grist, Slate and The Wall Street Journal and is known for his mentions of global climate change.
Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for inventing and promoting doomer fringe theories such as Near-Term Human Extinction (NTHE), which predicts human extinction by 2026.
"The Uninhabitable Earth" is an article by American journalist David Wallace-Wells published in the July 10, 2017 issue of New York magazine. The long-form article depicts a worst-case scenario of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming. The story was the most read article in the history of the magazine.
Extinction Rebellion is a UK-founded global environmental movement, with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse. Extinction Rebellion was established in Stroud in May 2018 by Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and Roger Hallam, along with eight other co-founders from the campaign group Rising Up!
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming is a 2019 non-fiction book by David Wallace-Wells about the consequences of global warming. It was inspired by his New York magazine article "The Uninhabitable Earth" (2017).
The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
Solomon M. Hsiang is an American scientist and economist who directs the Global Policy Laboratory and is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-founded the Climate Impact Lab and is a National Geographic Explorer. Hsiang’s work has been featured in media articles and impacted policy across international and US federal institutions.
The World Around is a global design conference and media organisation that publishes video presentations and short documentary films under the slogan "Architecture's Now, Near, and Next" covering contemporary ideas and projects in architecture and design. The organisation is a 501c3 registered public charity in the United States, and seeks to "make the best new ideas in architecture accessible to all." The platform has a particular focus on climate change and social justice issues, and hosts the Young Climate Prize, a mentoring scheme for climate change-focused designers between the ages of 13 and 25.
Climate change and civilizational collapse refers to a hypothetical risk of the impacts of climate change reducing global socioeconomic complexity to the point complex human civilization effectively ends around the world, with humanity reduced to a less developed state. This hypothetical risk is typically associated with the idea of a massive reduction of human population caused by the direct and indirect impacts of climate change, and often, it is also associated with a permanent reduction of the Earth's carrying capacity. Finally, it is sometimes suggested that a civilizational collapse caused by climate change would soon be followed by human extinction.
