Join Nathaniel Rich and Alec MacGillis at Bird in Hand for an essential conversation about climate change.

By 1979, we knew all that we know now about the science of climate change—what was happening, why it was happening, and how to stop it. Over the next ten years, we had the very real opportunity to stop it. Obviously, we failed.

Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking account of that failure—and how tantalizingly close we came to signing binding treaties that would have saved us all before the fossil fuels industry and the Republican Party fully committed to anti-scientific denialism—is already a journalistic blockbuster, a full issue of The New York Times Magazine that has earned favorable comparisons to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Rich has become an instant, in-demand expert and speaker. A major movie deal is already in place. Publishers around the world are clamoring for the rights. It is the story, perhaps, that can shift the conversation.

In the book Losing Earth, Rich is able to provide more of the context for what did—and didn’t—happen in the 1980s and, more important, is able to carry the story fully into the present day and wrestle with what those past failures mean for us in 2019. It is not just an agonizing revelation of historical missed opportunities, but a clear-eyed and eloquent assessment of how we got to now, and what we can and must do before it's truly too late.

Nathaniel Rich is the author of three novels: King Zeno (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018); Odds Against Tomorrow (FSG, 2013); and The Mayor’s Tongue(Riverhead, 2008). Losing Earth: A Recent History will be published in April 2019 by MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rich’s short fiction has been published by McSweeney’s, Vice, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the American Scholar; the stories “The Northeast Kingdom” and “Blue Rock” were both finalists for the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and the latter was awarded the 2017 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction. Rich served as Fiction Editor of the Paris Review between 2005 and 2010. He is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine; his essays on literature appear regularly in the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books. His reported pieces, appearing in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Men’s Journal, have appeared in various anthologies, including the Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Alec MacGillis covers politics and government for ProPublica. MacGillis previously spent three years writing for The New Republic, five years as a national reporter for The Washington Post, and five years at the Baltimore Sun.

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