Ocean Book of the Month
Every month, The Ocean Project highlights a book focused on our blue planet or environmental sustainability. Books for all age groups will be covered, non-fiction and fiction, prose and poetry. If you have a suggestion, please let us know.
Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
by Mark Hertsgaard
Will humans survive the environmental degradation we've released on the world, or will we drive ourselves to extinction alongside countless other species? Mark Hertsgaard sets forth to explore this question in his book Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, and while he does not arrive at a vision of humanity on the brink of extinction, he presents a sobering portrait of problems present and impending.
During a six-year worldwide investigation into our globally shared environmental predicament, Hertsgaard determined that the largest environmental problem facing humanity is poverty. As he relates his encounters with individuals from Sudan to China to Brazil, he shows how desperately the impoverished people of developing nations deserve a better life, and, at the same time, how inconceivable it is, under current models of development, that the world's poor will be able to significantly improve their lot without wreaking havoc on global life-support systems. His depiction of a steadily developing China, with nearly a quarter of the world's population, is particularly fascinating and disturbing. Although, at times Hertsgaard seems a bit scattered in his story telling, in the end he brings together a powerful message to a world and a society that is in desperate need of change.
LiP magazine writes:
"Hertsgaard pulls no punches: the ecological crisis rests squarely on the "dilemma" created by the technological and economic successes of the West: we in the advanced nations have been accustomed to generally unsustainable levels of consumption. Even worse are the consequences of trying to extend this standard of living to all 6 billion human inhabitants of a beleaguered planet earth."
This book should motivate and inspire us to consider our commute in the context of our global environment.
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Read the full LiP Magazine book review.
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Read more of Hertsgaard on his home page.
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Find out how you can help do your part at the Seas the Day action pages.
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If you are interested in reading this book but also want to be a conscious consumer, please visit your local library and check it out.
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