From the publishers: “In the tradition of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and Edward O. Wilson’s The Future of Life, acclaimed science and history writer Marq de Villiers offers a potent antidote to the doomsday prognoses on our world’s ability to sustain life in the future. By turns harrowing and inspiring, here is the story of how, within the solutions to the global crises we face, lie the seeds of something greater.”



 

















Before Nature we are illiterates [and] the best way of destroying a library is ... not being able to read.”
-- Jerome Deshusses






This is not the book!

The book is the book, and the argument is laid out there. What you get here are additions, annotations, amplifications, updates, supplements, curiosities, recommendations and occasional ephemera

1 Where Do We Want to Go?
2 How We Got into This Mess: The Crises So Far
3 Every Little Bit Helps – or Does It?
4 The Polemical Politics of Climate Change
5 Some Easy Fixes for Global Warming and Some that Are Trickier
6 Fix Energy (1): Hunting the Elusive Negawatt
7 Fix Energy (2): Can Alternative Energies Really Save Us?
8 Fix Energy (3): Gridlock and Its Consequences
9 Fix Energy (4): Too Much Hot Air About Hydrogen
10 Fix Energy (5): Colliding with Atomic Energy
11 Fix Population: The Buzz About Global Swarming
12 Fix Food: The Reinvention of Farming
13 Fix Politics: Democracy, Perhaps, for a Change
14 Fix the Economy (1): What Is the Economy For?
15 Fix the Economy (2): The Ills of Corporate Capitalism
16 Fix the Economy (3): What Traders and Bankers Do, And How to Change Them
17 Fix the Economy (4): Private, Public, or Future Perfect?
18 Fix the Economy (5): Shifting to a Steady-State Economy
19 Fix the Scale: Closer to Home
Epilogue