Roy Scranton is an interesting person. A teenage reprobate, full of angst and protest, he drifted from one low level job to another, eventually coming back to live in his mother’s basement. A stint in the army that took him to Iraq both straightened him out and screwed him up. He came back to become a scholar, intensely well read, citing all kinds of obscure references and dropping a lot of names, even just long lists of them, but totally consumed by war. It is all on evidence in We’re Doomed. Now What?

It begins with a series of perceptive essays on the environment. “We need to learn to let our current civilization die, to accept our mortality and practice humility,” he says. He visits Greenland where he finds it is losing about 300 billion tons of ice every year. This alone will raise sea levels more than 20 feet. “We find ourselves less than human, lacking even the dumb instinct for survival we see in the way plants will bend toward the sun.”

Those first essays are powerful. But from there, things get confusing. Scranton spends over a hundred pages reliving his army stint in Iraq, and revisits, on behalf of Rolling Stone, to discover how corrupt and messed up their elections are. He then pivots to the Soviet Union and how much it sacrificed in World War II, then to Seymour Hersh’s article claiming the Osama Bin Laden trackdown was a fraud. He also draws parallels and connections between police shooting blacks and American wars and warriors. You might notice the book on the environment and climate change has completely disappeared.

So despite the title, this is not a book on the environment. It is a cathartic collection of disparate essays from 2010-1018, demonstrating Scranton’s erudition and ability to research. But everything is suffused with soldiering and war. He blames the USA for Iraq and Afghanistan’s “ongoing human suffering almost incomprehensible in its meaninglessness. “ At times it is profound, but it is often PTSD on display.

David Wineberg