Warmth

From a millennial climate activist, an exploration of how young people live in the shadow of catastrophe

Warmth is a new kind of book about climate change--not a prescription or a polemic, but an intensely personal examination of how it feels to imagine a future under its weight, written from inside the youth-led climate movement itself. It is a critical excavation of the ways we talk about the climate crisis--at the national level, in our communities, and to ourselves--and a memoir of the ongoing struggle to sustain the difficult work of fighting "the Problem."

Though it addresses an issue of global concern, Warmth arises from a specific time and place: post-Sandy New York. Weaving sit-ins and snowstorms, synagogues and subway tunnels, Sherrell delves into the questions that feel most urgent to young people at our current crossroads. He explores how we conceptualize the crisis, the ethical implications of having children, our changing relationship to time, and the metaphors that mediate our individual and collective emotional responses--breaking "climate" out of its discursive box in the process. In seeking new ways to understand and respond to these forces that feel so far out of our control, Warmth lays bare the common stakes we face, and illuminates new sources of faith in our shared humanity. Advance praise for Warmth:

"Sherrell's strikingly perceptive book is neither a prescription for hope or for despair, but a call for a clear-eyed examination of one of the most pressing questions of our time-what do we owe the next generation?" 

-Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

"Searchingly honest, this fine book is the work of someone actively engaged in the most important fight of our time (maybe of all time), and also of a writer able to establish the necessary distance. Dan Sherrell is smart, obviously, but he's something much more important: open, vulnerable, able to face fully that which we all must grapple with in this overheating century." 

-Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

"Little has been written that so vividly captures what it is like to be young and so-very-much alive in the wealthiest nation in the world as it comes undone. Daniel Sherrell's Warmth is a groundbreaking work: it shows us how to fight-emotionally, intellectually, physically, with all one's might-for a future worth inhabiting."     

-Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore 



"An urgent cri de coeur from a passionate and clear-eyed new talent."

-Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future  Daniel Sherrell is an organizer in the climate movement. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate, jobs, and justice legislation in New York, and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction. Warmth is his first book.