One man's "curiously thrilling joyride" of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation (Donovan Hohn). As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.
In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything--from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world.
This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys--each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.
Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated,
The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change--that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.
Author: Porter Fox
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 11/15/2022
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.70w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780316460903
About the AuthorPorter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. He is the author of
Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border and
DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, featured on the cover of
The New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. He lives, writes and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal
Nowhere in upstate New York.
His work has been published in
The New York Times Magazine,
The Believer,
Outside,
Men's Journal,
National Geographic Adventure,
Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com,
Narrative,
The Literary Review, and has been anthologized in
The Best American Travel Writing. He teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from
Northland.