Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "asimov"

Our Angry Earth by Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl (First Paperback Edition March 2019), Newtom Doherty Associates 1991.

There was a good reason that this 1991 book was republished in 2018. It still rings true with its 400 pages of suggestions. They’re all too familiar: carbon dioxide, CFCs, cutting down forests, rice paddies, garbage, etc. The authors saw the likelihood of an increase in violent weather and loss of water in our rivers, the breakup of Antarctic ice, the threat to island nations, more violent weather, and a “rise in sea levels.”

In all wars, it’s the environment that always loses. Species extinctions have been happening faster than ever, primarily because we humans are destroying our environment. Humans could become extinct, the authors feared in 1991, because of our “human interventions--like acid rain, the global green house warming, war, and our destruction of the environment we depend on for life” No doubt the world population is exploding alarmingly,primarily because of our “unrestrained and wasteful use of energy and resources”

Note that this quote was written before 1991, when the rate of repair was far slower than the rate at which we do damage now. Note the current effort to rid the seas of plastic extrada.

The losses are environmental at five different levels: 1) the “despoiling of national treasure,” like wild animals, plants, forests, and riversides, 2)benefits from undiscovered sources,3) pollution of benign environmental conditions, 4)greenhouse affecting warming, and 5) the extinctions of life on Earth.

In 1991 the authors blamed America for contributing “the most.problems.” Though this may no longer be true, we are still in a good, if not the best, place to do something important about the problems.”

The author lists coming problems like “sunburn, drinking water supplies, soil loss, even outer space pollution.” The last half of the book is devoted to solutions--burning waste to provide energy or using waste heat from industry, using solar power and other renewable resources
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We would never run out of wind, waves, and subterranean heat if we depended on natural timing and power storage. Bookkeeping could help, like “imposing a carbon tax on electricity.” The biggest source of pollution is transportation, especially the car, crop rotation, and poor distribution of food. The last section of the book is dedicated to education, with hope that these kinds of suggestions will secure the future.