The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown
(Bloomsbury 2023)
The stories we tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most consequential impacts are being felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction.
Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction.
Already being heralded by some of our best natural history writers and climate activists, Adam Welz employs classic natural history, firsthand reporting and insights from cutting edge science to bring readers inside our planet’s sixth great extinction and issues an urgent plea to save what is left of the miraculous, vibrant entity that is life on Earth—before it slips away.
An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too late.
Praise for The End of Eden
“The world is not ours alone, and it's not only humans who suffer from our warping and degrading of it. Everything is changing now-a global transformation of horrible majesty. In his exquisite meditation, Adam Welz shows us how to see it-and feel it- in full.” ―David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth
“Climate change, Adam Welz shows, is already pushing many creatures toward oblivion, and its impacts are only going to grow. The End of Eden is at once an elegy and an exhortation—a plea to save what’s left of the Earth’s magnificent diversity.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Under a White Sky
“A book both celebratory and heartbreaking, Adam Welz revels in the marvels of life’s diversity and delivers a devastating account of ecological crisis. He brings climate breakdown’s effects on the more-than-human world to vivid life, revealing in the process the interconnectedness of all species.” —David George Haskell, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Sounds Wild and Broken
“Adam Welz is a first-class observer of the natural world, usually found with binoculars around his neck. He's also a first-class reporter on the science of our environmental predicaments. Together, these traits have allowed him to produce a book that goes deeper than any before into the meaning of the climate breakdown for all the rest of creation that shares this planet uneasily with us.” —Bill McKibben
“Adam Welz has thrown a wonderfully wide net over the natural world, from birds to corals to mammals, in Europe, North America and Australia, to portray the array of life at risk in a rapidly warming world. He evokes wonder, which may well be the last arrow we have in the quiver to convince us to change our course.” —Jim Robbins, author of The Wonder of Birds
“An eloquent, deeply informed account of the unfolding consequences of the climate crisis for all life on Earth.” —Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts
“Climate chaos isn’t just inflicting disaster on cities and farms, it’s ravaging non-human life: Hornbills are overheating, moose are getting bled dry by ticks, and coral reefs are turning a ghostly bone-white as they cook. In The End of Eden, Adam Welz adeptly synthesizes scientific research and his own keen observations of nature to depict the cataclysmic effects of our climate crisis on biodiversity. More than six decades after Silent Spring exposed the harms of chemical pesticides, Welz has written a Rachel Carson-esque account of a human-caused global force that threatens the future of all wild creatures.” —Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings
MEDIA CONTACT: Lauren Ollerhead at Bloomsbury US - lauren.ollerhead@bloomsbury.com