Customer Reviews

The Little Earth Book (Fragile Earth)

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Already a third of the planet's "natural wealth" has been lost.

If everyone lived as we do in the US, it would take four earths to support us.

In the last 50 years - with the intensive use of pesticides - the US has doubled the amount of crops lost to pests.

Three-fourths of all plant species have become extinct since 1900.

Environmental disasters have left 80 million people as refugees.

The number of people living on $2 a day in the world has risen by 50% in the last 20 years.

Genetically modified crops have farmers using more herbicides and pesticides, not less.

90% of the Earth's dwindling fresh water supply is consumed by industry alone.

The top 1% of US households possesses more wealth than the entire bottom 95%.

Commercial banks, not the central government, create the build of America's currency.

The arms trade is America's most heavily subsidized industry.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Concise, well-documented, and full of great references and links, discussions in this book range from nanotechnology to natural farming; from biomimicry to the patenting of life; from the future of oil and the hydrogen economy; from ecological footprints to global equity accounting schemes; from the arms trade to peace tools; from religion to sustainability; from eugenics to intuition and creativity; from antibiotics to genetic experimentation; from Christianity to Islam; from increasing economic inequality to universal basic income grants; from plutonium to persistent organic pollutants; and draws from a wide variety of sources, from Bill Clinton to Hildegard of Bingen. Were the book printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper, I would dare say it foot the recognition-of-global-ecocrisis-and-response bill perfectly. Oh, wait, it was.

Another Disinformation Mindbomb!

This book despite little, is a compact review of several sort of issues that matters to the present and future of our habitat. Each short chapter is a comprehensive description and analysis of the causes and possible solutions for the anthropogenic problems that we are producing to the earth.

While issues like GM crops and global warming are hot topics, the research on some of these things is still accumulating- so results are inconclusive. However, as with any issue, the alarmist perspective is very seductive- the problem is, it leads people to make too many assumptions. I'll toss out an example or two of my favorite issues:

"Our earth is heating up from pollution and greenhouse gasses and..."

The earth's climate has been fluctuating forever. We just recently (past 50 years) started looking for possible human causes of climate change. Science takes time to pin things down accurately- I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions. Besides, alarmists say that the world's oil is going to be gone in about 50 years anyway. One of the first things i learned in science is that a correlation does not necessarily lead to a connection. Just because the earth's temperature and sea levels are rising now, does not mean that stopping all pollution will curb that trend. I'm sure burning fossil fuels doesn't help, but don't be tempted to point to cars and factories as the sole cause
of it all.

"Recycling helps save trees and resources, etc"

Recycling is a waste of resources in general- it takes more fuel and money to reprocess paper and plastic than using virgin materials (fuel for the trucks, factories, etc). In most communities, the only thing worth recycling economically is aluminum. Paper is a renewable resource- we grow trees specifically to make paper; we don't need to produce chemical waste from recycling it needlessly (waste from acid residue can be found in a lot of paper today). In the end, conservation isn't always a bad thing- but it's an overall wasteful process right now, so I'd rather it not be a subsidized instisution getting money from my paycheck.

"Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."
-John Tierny, New York Times

Heh, couldn't resist throwing in some spin.

I'm not against reading this book at all- its good to look at global/environmental issues. Just make sure you look at both sides.