Are climate change threats even worse than the sustainability experts warned us about? While some politicians who profit from the status quo continue to spread propaganda and deny the severity of environmental stress, climate scientists have migrated to far gloomier forecasts than we’ve become accustomed.
It is shocking and scary that this new generation of books on sustainability are quite different from the last generation on the same topic. Older books like Eaarth, Storms of My Grandchildren, The Earth is Flat, The World Until Yesterday, Hot, Flat and Crowded, and such that held out hope for the next generations aging gracefully as a planet. I’ve read dozens of books on many aspects of sustainability from agriculture to economics and political impact, all with some version of this theme. It is a scary warning but maybe not scary enough.
These new books like The Uninhabitable Earth and Losing Earth forecast a grossly worse future and lack of sustainability: massive death
, migration, political upheaval and war; our worst nightmares.
I haven’t read the two latest books but I will soon. I wish everyone would. Yet we know from historical and archaeological accounts of past mass extinctions caused by environmental stress, major segments of the population continue to will deny the existence of the environmental threats until shortly before their mass deaths as a result of the tragedy. Islanders
, for example, in past civilizations who starved after they chopped down and burned the last of trees needed to make canoes for fishing required to feed themselves. So what’s the point, really? We really need to ask the tougher questions about how we plan to deal with these new severe threats of climate change in the face of political denial of those in power who profit from its cause. How do we deal with those on our island who chop and burn trees when we really need to be conserving trees and growing forests?
