Our Dying Planet: An Ecologist's View of the Crisis We Face Hot

Peter Sale is an academic. In his book, Our Dying Planet, he addresses a non-academic audience and reviews the ongoing changes in the natural environment in which we live. He states that we are now experiencing the "Holocene Extinction" - an extinction of species that may be proceeding at a much faster pace than at any previous time in our planet's history. Does this reduction of number of species matter? Perhaps not much on an individual level - the world's ecosystems can perhaps survive the loss of the Dodo. But at some point the cumulative effects will cause major disruptions, the tipping point will be exceeded and the world around us will become a very different place from the one we know.

What is the cause of our Holocene Extinction? The over-simplified answer (which does not do justice to Sale's full arguments) is - too many people consuming too many resources at a rate at which they cannot be replenished coupled with excessive use of fossil fuels.

Sale examines the importance of "ecological complexity" and recasts our understanding of "resilience" by suggesting that particular ecosystems (or perhaps particular "patches" of ecosystems) have "inertia" and can withstand a certain amount of disruption until such time as disruption is so overwhelming that the ecosystem, or patch, changes its character - for example from forest to desert or from sea-ice to open water.

Sale reminds us that technologies exist NOW to allow us to improve matters by replacing fossil fuels with energy from falling water, solar, wind, waves, etc. He states forcefully that we know the answers. We already know what to do. For example, reduce energy use by building to LEED standards, enlarge railway nets to reduce energy used in truck transport, encourage smaller numbers of children, etc. What we lack is public consensus and the political will to do it.

Sale's goal is to cause us all to come to a very widespread understanding of why we must change our ways - and to do so on ALL fronts. His hope is that this understanding will help to create a the sea change in public attitudes and behavior that may, finally, persuade politicians to pay attention to assuring that the global ecosystems remain habitable for our children and their children.

Sale's litany of unhappy news is presented with a lively and accessible writing style, peppered with frequent intriguing anecdotes from his research life (for example, observation of the real estate transactions of damsel fish) and some most intriguing real-life examples of "doing it right" - of hopeful management of the sort that might steer us away from the looming disasters. There IS hope - if we can only manufacture the concerted public and political will to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel and, most of all, to reduce our population growth.
--Anna Mallin, Amazon