rblog

Author: Marq de Villiers
Amazon info

The beginning of the book, with its look at historical extinction events (the big 5), was the highlight for me. The book was well organized around the types of disasters that can occur (comets/asteroids, volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics, floods, hurricane/tornadoes) - but by this time the number of errors/typos began to mount. A 0.4C degree rise in temperature was equated to a 33F degree (rather than a 3.3 degree rise). Normally a typo like this might not be so bad, but at other times there are references to 40F degree temp swings (that are somewhat hard to believe) and those could be erroneous as well. The Earth's circumference was stated at 24 miles, rather than 24,000 and there were several other errors.

Back to the book - the first part of the book makes the claim that the earth is a violently changing planet - and has always been so. We should expect "disasters" in the future, they will occur - even if many of them weren't of our own making. And the planet has always survived and will probably survive for billions of years (until the Sun incinerates it). Human life on the planet - a different issue entirely.

And this is where things get a little confusing to me. The author appears to be particularly against growth - for all the obvious reasons - and it is fine to push a no-growth philosophy, or at least to question the assumption of our culture that growth is good and required. His point being that the growth curve that humans are on will destroy our ability to live on this planet. And he points out how many people die in hurricanes because they live to close to the shore and how many people die due to x, y, and z which are preventable. But if all those deaths are preventable, don't we simply accelerate our core problem (growth/overcrowding)?

The author has already argued (and I agree) that the planet will be fine no matter what. So the only question is what happens when humans hit the limit of the planets capacity for humans? Obviously, humans will start dying. In the tens of millions (at least). So the alternative (once the technology has raised the carrying limit as far is it will go) is to not be born. And this seems to be the author's argument (although not that clearly stated). But it also isn't debated as to whether it is better to have shorter life spans for 11 billion people or to have longer life spans for 10 billion and to prevent 1 billion from being born. In essence, it is better to have lived and died, than to have never lived at all?

So all in all, while the book is thought provoking and provides a lot of useful information, the inaccuracies cloud the data and the conclusions are a bit muddied. There must be better books on the topic.