I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World

These striking essays, originally serialized on Wilson’s Substack, This Is Precious, find her moving from the vigorous hope of 2020’s This One Wild and Precious Life toward a bracing reckoning with what she characterizes as civilization’s impending collapse. She maps out how this will likely occur thanks to a combination of the ever-warming climate and interlocking, global systems that will fail piece-by-piece, creating a domino effect that ripples across the globe and spells out a “slow-at-first-then-rapid decline of population, identity, and socioeconomic order.” This can’t be avoided, she writes, though readers should still take steps to stave it off by demanding regulations on new technologies, supporting climate reforms, and more. But most of the account is spent investigating what it means to cultivate a holistic approach to impending disaster by connecting with one’s community, living deeply, and engaging in the sometimes-difficult project of making meaning amid chaos. Drawing on perspectives from climate scientists, psychologists, and technology futurists, the author’s raw soul searching gives rise to plenty of hard questions as well as some surprisingly beautiful meditations on what it means to be human in an age of uncertainty. Challenging and rewarding, this will stick in readers’ minds. (June)