Requiem for a Species
Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. But around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming.
This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, so that now it is too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out.
And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures, and what we can do now.
Because we don’t have to take this lying down.
Requiem for a Species is published in the United Kingdom and North America by Earthscan and in Australia by Allen & Unwin.
Read the blog.
Watch the speech to the RSA.
Watch the speech at the ANU.
Read an extract in the Guardian.
"Book of the Week" in the Times Higher Education supplement.
Winner, Queensland Premier's Literary Award for a work Advancing Public Debate, 2010
Praise for the book:
"This is a provocative and sobering book, in which Hamilton shows very clearly that the climate problem is now primarily a question of social science: of psychology and political economy." Book of the Week, Times Higher Education Supplement
‘Hamilton’s book presents a powerful statement of the problems confronting us – not just the problem of climate change itself, but the tendency to wish the problem away by denial. Read this book.’
Professor Lord May OM AC FRS, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Clive Hamilton "makes an impeccable case for our inability or unwillingness to act rapidly enough to meet the challenge of the way our lifestyle is altering the very chemistry of the planet's atmosphere." David Suzuki
"I am afraid Clive Hamilton has it right about climate change – deeply afraid. Requiem is a brave and seeringly honest book by a brilliant scholar. Ignoring him will only make a bad situation worse, so, please, read this book now."
James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World, and Dean Emeritus, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
"A riveting book, it is quite simply the best explanation I have read of humanity's collosal failure to act in the face of an imminent threat to life on earth." Green Book Reviews
“Requiem for a Species magnificently captures the idea that, by and large, none of us want to believe that climate change is real. It explains our inability to seriously weigh the evidence of climate change, and to take appropriate action to ensure our own survival.” Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia
“Clive Hamilton, as usual, has courageously challenged the current nature of our society in this inspirational new book.” Graeme Pearman, former head of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research
"... intellectually powerful and relentlessly researched, it is at times dispiriting, though the final magisterial chapter, Reconstructing a future, lifts the book towards brilliance." The Age
"Hamilton makes a powerful case--one that survives my deep-rooted desire not to be persuaded by it." Sydney Morning Herald
“I find it hard to imagine what life would be like if I had genuinely come to the irrevocable conclusion that it was too late to do anything serious about preventing runaway climate change. … For me, this has been an ongoing internal dialogue for at least the last five years. It gets a little bit more painful, every year … And having just finished reading Clive Hamilton’s excellent (but deeply disturbing!) Requiem for a Species, I’m now going to have to think it all through all over again.” Jonathan Porritt
‘Hamilton's deconstruction of climate denial and its consequences is devastating. Listen to this Requiem and weep, if it helps. False hope is as dangerous as despair, Hamilton reminds us. But don't get mired in helplessness. Above all, Requiem is a call to arms; to the urgent task of overhauling democracy in pursuit of survival. At stake, the biggest prize of all: our own humanity.’
Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth
‘Requiem for a Species is a remarkable publication which brings together the scientific imperatives of taking action in the field of climate change. Hamilton highlights the political inertia which is currently acting as a roadblock. In the wake of the weak outcome of Copenhagen, this book assumes added significance in breaking the resistance to the truth about climate change.’
R K Pachauri, Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Director-General, TERI
‘When future generations look out on a planet ravaged by climate change, they will ask of our generation “When you knew what was happening – surely the greatest debacle since we came out of our caves – why didn’t you stop it?” Clive Hamilton proposes the problem lies with “the perversity of our institutions, our psychological dispositions, our strange obsessions, our penchant for avoiding facts, and, especially, our hubris.” It all makes for a riveting read because, alas, it is all too true – just like Greek tragedy.’
Norman Myers, 21st Century School, University of Oxford
‘Clive Hamilton investigates – in real time – our society’s choice not to act to protect ourselves from devastating climate change. We know the science, but “scientific facts are fighting against more powerful forces” – power, money, bureaucratic inertia and our innate desire to ignore what we don’t want to believe. “It’s too late,” he says. “Humanity failed.” That past tense is devastating.’
Fred Pearce, writer and author of The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
"Hamilton demonstrates the originality of thought, courage and penchant for confrontation that has made him one of Australia's most popular public researchers ....[Requiem for a Species] may be the most rigorous expose on climate change to date." Suite101.com
"It takes intellectual rigour, as well as moral courage, to write a rational analysis of what is essentially the collective insanity of our own species. This book ought to be mandatory reading ..." Australian Book Review
"Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!) ... Requiem for a Species by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton is a tour de force of compression and analysis that cannot help but shift climate change thinking." Cultural Pilgrim
"... the best book written about the climate crisis, so far." The Whether Report
And for the author:
“Hamilton is a lucid writer, a gifted and witty speaker, and a passionately concerned citizen.” The Canberra Times
“Hamilton is remarkably Renaissance in his intellectual range.” The Monthly
"a writer of real range and eloquence" Sun Herald