Nowhere Left To Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species To The Ends Of The Earth, by Benjamin Von Brackel

A book as melodramatic as this one deserves a soundtrack with the (almost) title track being Melissa Ethridge’s “Nowhere To Go.” It is unclear why this book is as whiny as it is. This book, like so many others that are dealing with the problem of climate change, drastically oversimplify the problem, complain massively about the lack of response (which deserves its own more lengthy treatment), and gives generally apocalyptic discussion about the local extirpation of various creatures who can and have likely developed via speciation multiple times over the course of time. The geography is simple enough to understand, as increasing heat drives all kinds of species to seek more hospitable territories. Sometimes they are not able to make it, though, because their ranges are too local and they can only move up so far, or because human construction is in the way, or because other species are too successful where they are moving. Even here, though, there are at least some efforts that have been tried to establish refugia for species, and human beings in general are pretty sympathetic to stray creatures that they can protect, even if the logistics of protecting the right amount and kind of land are far from straightforward. It seems, sadly, that all of the whining does no good because the people who read a book like this are by and large not the sort of people who get a huge rush out of destroying creation.

This book is four parts long and is between 200 and 250 pages in length. The book begins with a discussion about the beginning of species migration in the prologue. The first part of the book then discusses the arctic, with discussions of hunters (1), hunted (2), the change of regime in the ocean (3), and a question as to where the whales are going (4). This is followed by several more chapters that deal with the new residents of the temperate zone, with chapters on the movement of bread and butter species away from their normal ranges (5), heating (6), moving forests (7), moving insects (8), the bumblebee paradox (9), as well as the threat to Japanese kelp (10). (Most of the threats discussed are based on national borders and local economies, not so much global numbers, alas.) The third part of the book discusses movement in the tropics, including a discussion of life in the tropics (11), the movement of corals (12), abrupt changes of regime (13), including those of the forests (14), and mountain biomes (15), as well as the transition of many areas from rain forest to savanna (16). The last part of the book gives the author’s suggested solutions (17). The book ends with an epilogue, notes, image credits, acknowledgements, an index, and information about the author.

There is a fundamental problem with books like this, in that the problems that they talk about and the audience they are trying to reach are simply not suitable for each other. Dealing with “climate change,” however one defines it, is a classic tragedy of the commons (with the earth as commons) where the free rider problem of nations like China and India makes it difficult if not impossible to get enough consensus for people to live according to the same standards. It matters little, as far as the world is concerned, whether forests are being destroyed in Indonesia or Brazil, or whether carbon dioxide is coming from American cars or Chinese factories, assuming that the global amount of released carbon is the deciding factor in determining temperatures. When you combine that with modeling that is too often believed and not sensitive enough to the earth’s own ways of dealing with the problem of water and air circulation, people get too alarmist and too whiny too quickly, venting their spleen in books that are aimed at people who are mostly friendly to the environment but lack any sort of power to make the sort of grand changes that would be necessary to deal with the massive global problem being discussed. All that is left for people to do, if they are so inclined, is virtue signal, while a great many elites seek to spread misery to the earth while exempting themselves from the suffering that comes from environmental austerity.