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Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress Audiobook
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A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for August 2025!
Extreme heat, fires, floods, and storms are transforming our planet. Yet we get increasing emissions, divisive politics, and ersatz solutions that offer more of the same: more capitalism, more complexity, more "progress."
The impasse we face is not only political and institutional, but cognitive, existential, and narrative. We're incapable of grasping the scale, speed, and impact of global warming. And we optimistically cling to a narrative that promises a better tomorrow if we just keep doing what we're doing.
It's past time to free ourselves from our dangerous and dogmatic faith. Such unwarranted optimism will accelerate our disintegration. If we want to have hope for the future, it must be grounded in a recognition of human limits—a view Scranton calls ethical pessimism.
Scranton describes the challenges we face in making sense of our predicament, from problems in communication to questions of justice, from the inherent biases in human perception to the difficulties of empirical knowledge. What emerges is a challenging but hopeful proposition: if we have the courage to accept our limits, we may find a way to embrace our future.
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About Roy Scranton
Roy Scranton is the author of War Porn and Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. His journalism, essays, and fiction have been published in The Nation, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.
About Paul Heitsch
After producing, directing, and engineering spoken word recordings for over twenty years, Paul Heitsch began narrating audiobooks in 2011, and has recorded many bestselling titles as both himself and under a pseudonym. A classically trained pianist, Paul is also a composer and sound designer, and is currently the director of music for the James Madison University School of Theatre and Dance, and an adjunct instructor for the JMU School of Music. He and his family live in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia (although Chicago will always be his hometown).