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Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

Alan Weisman
Back Bay Books, 2013
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Editorial Rating

9

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

Journalist Alan Weisman issues a storm warning against the dangers of overpopulation and environmental destruction. His narrative, based on astounding reporting, circles through nearly every corner of the planet. He explores the ways people are coping with life that is becoming increasingly less sustainable. Humanity now lives in an era when the art of survival means mastering the compulsion to consume. “Less is more” has never been so true. Moreover, technology is not the solution, and the belief that growth can cure bad financial habits is wrong. While “demography isn’t destiny,” Weisman urges individuals and governments to act more aggressively to find a proper balance between the environment and humankind. getAbstract recommends his deeply informed argument – based on fostering a more refined sense of what it means to be human – to policy makers, legislators, activists and citizens seeking a clear presentation of arguments against consumption and population growth.

Summary

Four Questions

Consider four central questions in the face of looming human overpopulation:

  1. What’s the maximum population the Earth can sustain without destroying humanity?
  2. What’s the most effective way to teach people that they must address overpopulation and that they have a choice of methods – some of which do fit their beliefs and customs?
  3. What are the limits of the Earth’s ecosystem? The planet probably can’t sustain more than 10 billion people. Today’s population is seven billion; even that may be too many.
  4. Can nations retrofit their economies to run on something other than growth?

However humanity answers these questions, it must gain control of population growth – or nature will. With that unfolds a future of famine, drought, pandemics and the collapse of the ecosystem. Those who disagree say the problem is not overpopulation but overconsumption, or they argue that society can always engineer an escape from food scarcity with technological breakthroughs. British economist Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) first articulated and popularized the dangers of overpopulation. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population...

About the Author

Prize-winning journalist Alan Weisman also wrote the New York Times bestseller The World Without Us. He teaches at the University of Arizona.

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