The Crises We Face

Bill McKiibben’s review in the August 20 New York Review of Books of Our Final Warning, Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, by Mark Lynas, lays bare the extreme peril humanity faces from global warming. In the same issue, foreign policy expert Jessica Matthew’s review of four books relating to the threat of nuclear war, including, most saliently, The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump, by former defense secretary William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina, is equally alarming.

     Global warming and the threat of nuclear war are the paramount issues facing us. At the same time, as Slate legal affairs commentator Diana Lithwick notes, we are facing a “catastrophic economic crisis, constitutional crisis, public health crisis, and rule of law crisis.” 

      Our country can’t begin to deal with these grave challenges until we get past the Trump and his enablers crisis.