Wasted World
How Our Consumption Challenges the Planet
-
- 11,99 €
-
- 11,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
This biologist’s “monumental cri de Coeur” for our planet offers a holistic view of our species, the waste we produce, and a path toward sustainability (Nature).
In Wasted World, Rob Hengeveld traces the entwined histories of population growth and resource consumption to reveal how our global waste crises came about. As Hengeveld explains, human life depends on energy, which we first obtained through food. Later, we supplemented this with energy from water, wind, animals, and finally fossil fuels, as one source after another fell short of our ever-growing needs. Greater energy consumption has created greater waste, including the atmospheric waste that is driving climate change. As we face a web of interconnected problems, addressing them individually will not work. Instead, Hengeveld argues, we need to tackle their common cause: our staggering population growth.
A practical look at the sustainability of our planet from a biologist and expert in the abundances and distributions of species, Wasted World examines the whole process of using, wasting, and exhausting energy and material resources. And by elucidating the complexity of the causes of our current global state, Hengeveld offers us a way forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this detailed study, biogeographer Hengeveld (affiliated with the Centre for Ecosystem Studies of Alterra, Wageningen, the Netherlands) tackles the dilemma of reconciling the way we live with the future effect our habits will have on the planet. Tracing our origins from the first reproducing cells to today's massive global economy, Hengeveld describes how all life depends on energy to thrive. We succeed by parlaying "growth out of growth out of growth of necessity, ad infinitum." But unless we figure out how to keep all matter in circulation, our planet will be exhausted of resources and become overcrowded with inert waste. By reducing production both in the sense of reproduction and consumption we may be able to survive the inevitable shortages of the coming years. Hengeveld forcefully (but apologetically) insists that global population control is a necessary first step in reorienting our priorities, along with radically changing our behavior to restrict consumption of precious energy resources. Over and over, the book asks what it will take for us to change our ways. While points are stirring and effective, the book ultimately rests on tiresome generalities and misses a crucial opportunity to drive its message home a sad irony for a book that purports to examine waste, in all its varied forms.
