Join us for a conversation with author Eric Dean Wilson on his book After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Wilson braids together air-conditioning history, climate science, road trips, and philosophy to tell the story of the birth, life, and afterlife of Freon, the refrigerant that ripped a hole larger than the continental United States in the ozone layer. As he traces the refrigerant’s life span from its invention in the 1920s—when it was hailed as a miracle of scientific progress—to efforts in the 1980s to ban the chemical (and the resulting political backlash), Wilson finds himself on a journey through the American heartland, trailing a man who buys up old tanks of Freon stockpiled in attics and basements to destroy what remains of the chemical before it can do further harm.

Wilson’s writing has appeared in TIME, Esquire, Tin House, the Los Angeles Review of Books and BOMB, among other publications. A graduate of The New School’s MFA program, Wilson is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where his work focuses on environmental humanities, the personal essay, queer theory, and the Black radical tradition. Wilson is also a Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at The Graduate Center. He has taught climate-themed writing and environmental justice to undergraduates at Queens College, FIT, The New School, and Ramapo College of New Jersey. Wilson Originally from Memphis, Tennessee, he now lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

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This program is co-sponsored by LexCAN.

This program is made possible by the generous donors to the Cary Library Foundation.