Navigating our Climate Predicament

With global warming projected to rocket past the 1.5°C limit, lifelong activist Andrew Boyd is thrown into a crisis of hope, and off on a quest to learn how to live with the “impossible news” of our climate doom. He searches out leading climate thinkers asking them: “Is it really the end of the world? and if so, now what?” With gallows humor and a broken heart, Boyd steers readers through their climate angst as he walks his own. From storm-battered coastlines to pipeline blockades and “hopelessness workshops,” he maps out our existential options, and tackles some familiar dilemmas: “Should I bring kids into such a world?” “Can I lose hope when others can’t afford to?” and “Why the fuck am I recycling?” He finds answers that will surprise, inspire, and maybe even make you laugh in this insightful and irreverent guide for achieving a “better catastrophe.”

The book comes with an expansive fold-out flowchart that maps out our climate predicament. During this event we will be walking through an interactive version of the flowchart with live narration from Andrew Boyd. The evening will NOT be a boring book reading. It will be interactive, participatory, fun; it'll be a chance to come together—aided by gallows humor and some unusual prompts (did we mention the new digital flowchart?!)—and reflect on some of the big questions before us. To tackle the climate emergency, we need each other; we need solidarity and laughter and all the rest. We hope to see you there.

Andrew Boyd is an author, humorist, and climate activist. His new book, I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope and Gallows Humor is forthcoming from New Society Press in February 2023. He is currently CEO (Chief Existential Officer) of the Climate Clock, a global campaign he co-founded that melds art, science, technology, and grassroots organizing to get the world to #ActInTime. Boyd also co-created the grief-storytelling ritual the Climate Ribbon and led the 2000s-era satirical campaign “Billionaires for Bush.” His previous books include Beautiful Trouble (OR Books, 2012); Daily Afflictions (WW Norton, 2002), and Life’s Little Deconstruction Book (WW Norton, 1998). Unable to come up with his own lifelong ambition, he’s been cribbing from Milan Kundera: “to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.”

I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
Andrew Boyd | February 2023 | New Society Publishers | 416 pages