NDPR Roy Scranton Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2026.01.2 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Roy Scranton, Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, Stanford University Press, 2025, 392pp., $30.00 (hbk) ISBN 9781503643161.

Reviewed by Arthur Obst, University of Chicago

In the decade since publishing Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, witnessing the steady march of rising global carbon emissions only disrupted temporarily by a world-wide pandemic, Roy Scranton has become even more pessimistic. In the preface to Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress, Scranton recounts a family trip to Chaco Canyon. Drawing from sources in the academic literature on collapse, he hypothesizes that complexity itself doomed its once thriving Puebloan civilization. Likewise, “the problem we face with climate change isn’t just unsustainable carbon waste… or metabolic disequilibrium” but complexity itself (xxii). Climate change, he surmises, is not something...