In 2015, twenty-one kids sued the federal government over climate change. Their case had the potential to be the civil rights trial of our century, but it hasn't happened. Instead, their day in court slipped by while the Trump Administration deployed rare and unorthodox legal tactics to stymie the case, leaving our nation's courts in a tangle and legal scholars aghast.As the World Burns tells the plaintiffs story. It reveals how very tangible harms wrought by the federal government have so profoundly damaged our planet that they threaten our fundamental constitutional rights to rights. Van der Voo delves into the lives of each of the children, exploring how and why each felt drawn to participate in the years-long case. From 16-year-old Jayden Foytlin, whose Louisiana home has already flooded twice during her short lifetime in what have been dubbed "thousand-year floods," to 21-year-old Jacob Lebel, whose Oregon farm is threatened by the planned path of a natural gas pipeline with dubious benefit, each has a unique role. They are all fighting to prove that the government continues to knowingly destroy, endanger, and impair the climate system--and that the government has done both too little to solve the problem and too much to worsen it, all while knowing of risks it poses to citizens. Timely, important, and urgent, As the World Burns is a story of the drastic consequences of the convenient half-measures of our time


Lee van der Voo is an award-winning investigative and environmental journalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian, and others. Lee’s reporting has received the Logan fellowship, the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and the Lizzie Grossman Grant for Environmental Health Reporting. Her first book The Fish Market won an Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction.