R.I.P. Jonathan Schell

It was only in seeing an issue of The Nation that is a few weeks old that I learned of the death of Jonathan Schell.  He was a writer and an activist who identified and helped to define the major issues of our time beginning with the Vietnam War, and his influential book of reporting, The Village of Ben Suc.

In the early 80s he wrote one of the most powerful books ever on the human dimensions of nuclear conflict, The Fate of the Earth.  Reading it first in the New Yorker was a powerful, poignant experience.  It had a great deal to do with the nuclear freeze movement of the 80s.

He warned against the Iraq war and remained an articulate opponent.  His 2007 book The Seventh Decade warned of new dangers of nuclear weapons and warfare--all the more dangerous because the common conception is that this danger is over.  It is not.

More recently he turned his attention to the climate crisis.  When asked to compare the threat of nuclear war with the climate crisis in a 2009 interview he said: "They are two of a kind. They’re both threats to species including our own and mutilations of the Earth which is all that we have. The difference is really between detroying ourselves instantly [with a nuclear war] or doing it more slowly with global warming. It’s a threat of a new order and death and magnitude. I think the nuclear danger was an alarm bell for the environment."

The book that binds the others together is his 2003 masterpiece The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.  If democracy and indeed civilization are to have a future, it is a book that will grow in importance.

"Books outlast their writers; his masterpieces are vividly alive now," writes Rebecca Solnit in her Nation remembrance (April 21).  "We can remember Jonathan Schell by continuing to read his incomparable insights and analyses and be grateful that he gave us all those decades of words describing the world in unexpected and important ways."