High Tide
How Climate Crisis is Engulfing Our Planet
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
The No Logo of climate change – a book that shows how global warming is not a theory we should still debate, but something that has already happened on a global scale.
Climate change is not a concern for the future. It's happening right now. In this book – based on the latest scientific evidence – the author takes us around the world to show the impact of global warming already being felt in people's lives.
From sand-buried houses in China to thawing Alaskan plains, the author witnesses some of the worst effects of climate change at first hand. Some, like the floods in the UK, are near home. Others – like the drowning Pacific island of Tuvalu – are a world away from the exhaust pipes and factory chimneys that are actually causing global warming.
But this isn't simply an inventory of disaster, it's a wry look at how people around the globe are coping as their world changes at unprecedented speed. In the process, the author eats whale blubber in Alaska, swims in shark-infested waters off the Great Barrier Reef and struggles to the top of Andean peaks in Peru. An adventure with a conscience and an argument with an urgent purpose, High Tide is an extremely important book.
Reviews
‘With High Tide, Mark Lynas has given us a tremendous gift: he has time-travelled into our terrifying collective future, a future that has already arrived in the farthest reaches of the globe. Go with him on this breathtaking, beautifully told journey – to island nations being engulfed by rising tides, to towns swallowed by encroaching desert, to glaciers melting into oceans – and I promise that you will come back changed, determined to alter the course of history.’
Naomi Klein, author of No Logo
‘Clear, lucid and informative.’ New Statesman
‘A thoroughly engaging and well-researched book.’ TLS
‘If you are among those who think climate change is an uncertain, remote issue over which scientists are unsure, politicians talk endlessly to little effect, and mere individuals have no power at all, this book may be for you … Lynas tells us to keep repeating the climate change message. Read his book, and that is exactly what you will do.’ Guardian
‘There will be many more books like High Tide, but this will be remembered as the first … it’ll be the one with the original vision … Not unworthy of comparison with Orwell and certainly the breaker of new ground.’ Independent
About the author
mark lynas is an activist, journalist and traveller, based in Oxford. He was editor of the website www.oneworld.net, has been involved in protests against GM crops, road-building, Manchester’s second runway etc, and as a result has made many appearances in the press and TV as a commentator on environmental issues. He also throws custard pies at lunatics who pronounce global warming a fantasy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deeply disturbed by unprecedented rain and catastrophic flooding in his native England, journalist Lynas set out on a three-year journey to bear witness to global climate change. Traveling to Alaska to see vanishing tundra, to the growing deserts of Inner Mongolia, to a tiny Pacific island nation facing devastation from rising ocean levels and finally to disappearing glaciers in Peru, Lynas vividly describes the physical and human toll our fossil fuel based culture takes on the planet. Not a scientist himself, Lynas bolsters his case with abundant footnoted scientific references. This is both personal journey and fierce polemic. Much of his political argument and ire is directed squarely at the U.S. In Lynas's view, the U.S., through its domestic and foreign policy, has undermined the valiant efforts of a coalition of developed and developing countries to control and even reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which the first Bush administration threatened to boycott had there been any agreement that included mandatory restrictions, through what he sees as the Clinton policy of "green" lip service, to the second Bush administration's 2001 unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, Lynas portrays a government in league with carbon-producing and -consuming industrialists bent on promoting a vision "that what is good for oil corporations is good for America and, by extension the world." In prose that is deeply felt and poignant, if sometimes awkward, Lynas makes no concession to evenhandedness in his assessment of the status quo. With a closing section including a six-point manifesto for addressing the global warming crisis and a comprehensive appendix listing information sources, advocacy groups and Web sites, this could well serve as a primer for budding anti global-warming activists. 6 pages of illus., maps not seen by PW.
