After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration

What if the people seized the means of climate production?

The window for action on climate change is closing rapidly. We are hurtling ever faster towards climate catastrophe—the destruction of a habitable world for many species, perhaps the near-extinction of our own. As anxieties about global temperatures soar, demands for urgent action grow louder. What can be done? Can this process be reversed? Once temperatures rise, is there any going back? Some are thinking about releasing aerosols into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the earth. And this may be necessary, if it actually works. But it would only be the beginning; it’s what comes after that counts.

In this groundbreaking book, Holly Jean Buck charts a possible course to a liveable future. Climate restoration will require not just innovative technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but social and economic transformation. The steps we must take are enormous, and they must be taken soon. Looking at industrial-scale seaweed farms, the grinding of rocks to sequester carbon at the bottom of the sea, the restoration of wetlands, and reforestation, Buck examines possible methods for such transformations and meets the people developing them.

Both critical and utopian, speculative and realistic, After Geoengineering presents a series of possible futures. Rejecting the idea that technological solutions are some kind of easy workaround, Holly Jean Buck outlines the kind of social transformation that will be necessary to repair our relationship to the earth if we are to continue living here.

• The Terraforming
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
• The Governance of Solar Geoengineering: Managing Climate Change in the Anthropocene
• Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (The MIT Press)
• This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
• Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds (Experimental Futures)
• Gun Island: A Novel
• Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and The Climate Crisis
• Surfacing
• Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy