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I wrote a five-part book report for some friends in December of 2004. It reviews and compares the following five books.

What these books have in common is that they all, in one way or another, focus on the coming global ecological and climatological crisis and offer their author’s ideas for how we (humanity) should deal with these problems.

1. Plan B – Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown

2. One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future by Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich

3. Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis – and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster by Ross Gelbspan

4. Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment by James Gustave Speth

5. The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson

This five-part book report can be found here… ➡

This excellent book, Plan B 2.0, which is a follow-on from Brown’s original Plan B which I reviewed here is now available on-line for free in the form of PDF files here.

I encourge everyone to read this book and to take to heart the warnings he issues. His concerns may seem like remote intellectual matters now but in not too many years, they will be in our back yards and they will have strong adverse effects on everyone of our lives.

Yet, if humanity is to deal successfully with issues of population, consumption, and power, the governance of the world clearly needs to be reorganized.  Impractical?  Not at all; nothing could be more practical to do.  Unrealistic or even politically impossible?  Maybe.  Once again, nothing is bound to prove ultimately more impractical than ignoring the global maldistribution of power, since it is one of the main driving forces of the human predicament.  Corporate behavior, we have seen, is directly responsible for much of the deterioration of the human environment, has played a major role in the generation of resource wars, and is indirectly responsible for many of the world’s consumption patterns.   Corporations have begun to slip out of civilization’s control.  These fictional individuals, functioning as the tools of very real individuals and the governments they often control, are becoming a law unto themselves in their effects on Earth’s environmental systems.   Those who worry about the world being taken over by computer robots actually should have a more immediate concern.

      Paul Ehrlich
      Bing Professor of Populations Studies, Department of 
      Biological Sciences, Stanford University

The thing that most characterizes the Ehrlich’s book for me is their balance and depth, in that they touch on virtually every issue I’ve listed in the issues section.  They tackle all of the major issues and trace each to their causal roots with unblinking clarity.  Paul Ehrlich has been involved with these issues since he wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 and his long years of familiarity with the subject matter show in the completeness of this book.

The Ehrlichs begin by comparing where we are now in history with where Mesopotamia was just before it imploded from abuse of its formerly abundant natural resources.  Today, the area is a wasteland and we have a lot to learn from their hubris.

To my full review: ➡

To the book at Amazon: ➡

 

Plan B not only argues … for the restructuring of the economy, it points out why this needs to be done at wartime speed.  Time is running out.  Whereas historically we lived off the interest generated by the earth’s natural capital assets, we are now consuming those assets themselves.  We have built an environmental bubble economy, one where economic output is artificially inflated by overconsumption of the earth’s natural assets.  The challenge today is to deflate the bubble before it bursts.

Lester R. Brown
Founder and former President of The World Watch Institute
Founder and President of the Earth Policy Institute
Plan B, like the Ehrlich’s One with Nineveh, is a strongly balanced book written by an author deeply familiar with the subject matter. 

In addition to discussing the global environmental crisis in great detail, Brown spends a good deal of time thinking about where the first environmental meltdowns are likely to occur and what effects they might have.  One area that concerns him is China with its 1.3 billion people.

To my full review ➡

To the book at Amazon: ➡

Brown has published an updated verion of his book called Plan B 2.0.

To the new version at Amazon: ➡

 

 …it is worth repeating that climate change is not just another issue in this complicated world of proliferating issues. It is the issue that, unchecked, will swamp all the other issues.

                Ross Gelbspan
                Long time reporter for The Philadelphia Bulletin,
                The Washington Post and The Boston Globe
                Joint-Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Of the several authors I’ve read on the Climate Crisis, Gelbspan is the most sensationalistic and the least careful about the quality of his sources. He cites facts drawn from newspapers side-by-side with facts drawn from peer-reviewed publications. He is a reporter first rather than dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist and he is relatively new to the subject. One gets the impression that the facts he pulls together are organized as much to shock his readers as to educate them. He is passionate and even angry about his subject. He is honest, however – the facts and the general patterns of information that he provides are, indeed, the same facts and patterns that appear in the other books. But, unlike the others, he is obsessed with the goal of dealing with global warming and unconcerned with impartially telling both sides or in alienating anyone. Whereas other authors will murmur about the inertia of vested interests in the oil and coal industries, Gelbspan will point-blank call the same thing ‘crimes against humanity’. Whereas most of the others want to preserve their ability to work with the administration when necessary, and thus gently coax and chide it, Gelbspan doesn’t care and his recounting of the sequence and events of this and previous administration’s malfeasance on climate issues is brutally candid.To the full review: ➡

To the book at Amazon: ➡