Writing Climate Futures

Los Angeles Review of Books and The Berggruen Institute present Writing Climate Futures, featuring David Wallace-Wells, Jenny Offill, Bharat Venkat, and Jonathan Blake.

As our planet faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency by the day. Through education, envisioning fictitious new worlds, and pushing forward the public discourse, writing holds the power to move the conversation we have around the future of our planet. LARB and The Berggruen Institute are thrilled to be joined by exciting voices in the climate movement from across genres to discuss how writing can enact change.

Join us July 18 at the historic Bradbury Building in Downtown Los Angeles for light snacks, drinks, and conversation. Authors will be signing books on sale from our friends at Skylight Books.

Ticket prices: LARB Members $60 | Non-members $75

LARB members: Sign in to the member portal to access exclusive pricing.

Proceeds from this event will support the work of Los Angeles Review of Books, a literary nonprofit and publication. Become a member today to receive exclusive ticket pricing, and more!

David Wallace-Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Penguin Random House, 2019), which argues that the state of the world, environmentally speaking, is “worse, much worse, than you think.” He is a weekly columnist and staff writer for the New York Times, deputy editor of New York Magazine, and he was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He writes frequently about climate and the near future of science and technology.

Jenny Offill is the author of three novels, Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and most recently, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. She teaches at Bard College and lives in upstate New York.

Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Institute for Society & Genetics, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology. His forthcoming title—tentatively titled Swelter: A History of Our Bodies in a Warming World— is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the fate of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. Dr. Venkat is the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab, which investigates thermal inequality from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from biology and history to anthropology and urban planning.

Jonathan Blake directs the Planetary Program at the Berggruen Institute. He is the coauthor, with Nils Gilman, of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises and author of Contentious Rituals: Parading the Nation in Northern Ireland.

The Berggruen Institute is a global network of thinkers that develop foundational ideas to shape political, economic, and social institutions for the 21st century.