To say that David Biello’s new book, The Unnatural World, is not uplifting would be an understatement. Its upshot is that we have seriously f—ed up this planet, along with all of the organisms and ecosystems residing on it, and the situation is likely to get much, much worse. But that’s hardly news at this point.

Biello knows that something must be done to keep ourselves from putting yet more CO₂ into the atmosphere and to counter or adapt to the effects of all the CO₂ we’ve spewed thus far. His book is an attempt to explore our options for doing so. But the resulting book is rambling, disorganized, and disjointed, filled with belabored, needlessly complicated sentences like “China is living in the future past, a Dickensian steam punk sci-fi drama in Mandarin, complete with high heels and disfigured orphans.” (?)

Each paragraph feels like it barely holds together, let alone each chapter or the book as a whole. Still, The Unnatural World is sobering and important.