In Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (University of Regina Press), Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky offer a Buddhist-Socratic take on climate doom. Their point is simple: instead of relying on technocrats to soften the effects of the climate crisis—mass migrations, flooded coastlines and atolls, untameable wildfires, food shortages, large-scale desertification—we ought to let “the facts form a poem” and spend more time on living meaningful lives. Turn to wisdom, they say, instead of obsessing over facts and inventions: the humanities might allow us to better confront a world of mass extinctions and ecological collapses. But Bringhurst and Zwicky must know that their words will find little purchase outside (and maybe even inside) the ecotopia west of the Cascades. I might even say their enlightened pessimism is as limited as the arrogant optimism of green consumerism. In every cataclysmic shift in recorded history, surely we can find words written in line with what Learning to Die offers, and surely it is those who stand on privileged ground that most readily listened to the so-called wisdom. Yes, humans will not destroy everything. As Zwicky and Bringhurst say, à la Buddhism, “being will still be here” and “beauty will still be here.” But is this thinking not the final point of a chain of logic that relieves us in the post-industrial West of the anguish and guilt we have accumulated for driving climate change with our unsustainable, mass-scale practices? In the past, Chinese hermits survived dynastic changes—which were marked by catastrophes, often in the backdrop of climate shifts—and their writings flourished. These learned men learned to let go of the material world—they learned to die, as Zwicky and Bringhurst would say—but the majority of Chinese citizens could not take to the hills and had to, in the thick of turmoil, learn how to survive. The most drastic changes to come will not be felt in Vancouver or Victoria or Salt Spring Island but in the High Arctic, the South Pacific, and in the poorer lands in the middle latitudes between.