Craig Childs, who is a commentator on National Public Radio, has written a strange book.  Apocalyptic Planet is primarily a collection of Childs’ extreme treks, each inspired by a different view of what the Earth might become after “the end of the world” as we know it.

Various possible scenarios are represented by Childs’ travels through a desert in Mexico, crumbling mountain glaciers in the Andes, an island remnant of the land bridge that once connected Asia and North America, an arctic research station buried in snow, and other terrains.  The one man-made landscape is a huge corn field of giant plants grown for industrial uses with “leaves so sharp they cut skin and cloth”.Most of his adventures include risky behavior that could lead to serious injury in places far-removed from civilized assistance.  Usually such behaviors involve Childs or one of his companions wandering off alone across dangerous terrain with no map or GPS or way to call for help.  In one case, the expedition leader chastises Childs for such an act.  I wouldn’t recommend such actions (and wouldn’t want to be hiking with someone who kept disappearing), but everyone survives these adventures.

Childs’ descriptions of his travels are often quite poetic.  He finds “a little bit of night still there” when digging below a desert surface; a spectacular sunrise is a “hydrogen bomb… before us”; mountain glaciers “broke like a wave through the highest peaks”… “looking like comet tails coming down the mountain”; the Bearing Straight is “where Russia and Alaska nearly kiss”; an airport control tower is a “silvery thumb”.  It seems strange to me, then, that he occasionally drops a vulgarity into his narrative.  The f-bomb seems to add nothing to his stories but might needlessly alienate some readers.

Interspersed with the adventure treks, Childs inserts paragraphs about the science related to whichever apocalyptic analogue he is walking though.  The science is interesting and fully imbedded within the adventures.  He discusses, for example, atmospheric Hadley cells and the bands of deserts on Earth, the relationship of Earth’s axis wobble to ice ages, tide charts that record a rapid surge in sea level starting around 1800, and the end-Permian extinction event.  He includes varying opinions from the scientists he interviews about the likelihood of future changes on Earth.  Childs accepts that global warming and the “sixth mass extinction” are underway, but attributes one of the most extreme projections, that the entire ice mass of Greenland would be gone in fifty years, to a PhD friend who is drunk during their conversation.

I would recommend this book to readers who mainly want stories of real-life adventure trips, and don’t mind learning some natural history along the way.  Just don’t use it as a template to plan your next trip to the wilderness.