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A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming
by Eric Holthaus
Book Reviewed by:The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.
The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus ("the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology"—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades.
Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face.
This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.
Excerpt
The Future Earth
Hurricane Maria damaged or destroyed about 30 million trees, inflicting profound and unprecedented changes on the landscape. With the climate warming so quickly, biologists in Puerto Rico think the forests Maria destroyed will never return to their previous diversity. Many of the island's largest and slowest-growing hardwood trees, like tabonuco and balata, suffered the worst damage. Their vast canopies provide habitats for birds, bats, and tree frogs. If future hurricanes are as strong (or even stronger) than Maria, Puerto Rico's forests will eventually feature only smaller and shorter trees that are more resilient to high winds and scouring floods, which will leave local species without shelter. More than a year after the storm made landfall, satellite images showed that the island appeared definitively less green.
The storm of Hurricane Maria still hasn't let up. A full-fledged mental health crisis is ongoing throughout the island, "the largest psychosocial...
The Future Earth is an attempt by meteorologist and science journalist Eric Holthaus to write a different kind of book about the current and future state of the environment. Holthaus is from Kansas, where irrigation for farming is draining the Ogallala Aquifer at an alarming rate. As a scientist, but also as a parent, he was desperate for some hope. Holthaus makes a clear case for the need for creativity and revolution. Drawing on the notion of the cyclical economy (also known as "doughnut economics," Kate Raworth's term), he imagines a move away from dichotomies like capitalism and socialism and towards schemes of stewardship and cooperation. We don't often recommend books with 3-star ratings on BookBrowse, but have chosen to feature this one because of the gravity of its message...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
In The Future Earth, Eric Holthaus describes having climate-related depression. Over the last two decades, we have become more attuned to the mental effects of worry about the environment. In 2003, Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the word "solastalgia," a variation on "nostalgia" that draws on the connotations of "desolation" and "solace." While "nostalgia" might be used to describe homesickness, solastalgia refers to a sense of mourning for a place that no longer exists. Inspired by his knowledge of the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales, a landscape irreversibly altered by coal mining and pollution, Albrecht defined the concept as "an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative ...
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