Humanity's Environmental Future: Making Sense in a Troubled World

There has been a lot of exciting movement at the Capitol recently--climate change and energy are top priorities in the new Congress. The newly discounted Humanity s Environmental Future provides detailed background information concerning both climate change and the energy crisis, as parts of a much bigger picture, all tied together neatly in this one comprehensive treatment. The book comprehensively examines the wide variety of difficult environmental and socio-economic problems facing humanity as it struggles toward a sustainable future. Powerful forces are driving us to degrade Earth's life-support system--the biosphere. These assaults are taking their toll, resulting in a daily barrage of news reports of environmental decline and ecosystem breakdown, all of which threaten Earth's ability to support its growing human population. The issues involved are imbedded in the industrial world's economic and business theories, lifestyles, development policies, and educational and political structures. They extend to the developing countries, as these follow similar growth, development, and economic advancement patterns. Humanity has already exceeded Earth's carrying capacity, in the absence of adequate supplemental energy inputs from the fossil fuels and other sources. As world petroleum production reaches a peak and then declines, there will be increasing pressure on energy prices to soar, possibly causing serious adverse economic consequences, and certainly stimulating major shifts in worldwide energy production and use. Major lifestyle and other changes are likely to result. Humanity's Environmental Future addresses these issues head on, examines their causes, and provides a variety of suggestions for reform. A major conclusion is that misplaced values and beliefs both drive humanity toward environmental disaster and prevent us from taking sufficiently comprehensive actions to stop the unrelenting destruction. Seven chapters are devoted to the insights and skills most needed for humanity to reverse its destructive course and make the needed changes before things have advanced so far that it may become too late to stop the worst of the consequences. The book concludes with several chapters dealing with specific reform proposals and positive suggestions for personal, group, and governmental action.