Download or read book Our Once and Future Planet written by Paddy Woodworth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The environmental movement is plagued by pessimism. And that’s not unreasonable: with so many complicated, seemingly intractable problems facing the planet, coupled with a need to convince people of the dangers we face, it’s hard not to focus on the negative But that paints an unbalanced—and overly disheartening—picture of what’s going on with environmental stewardship today. There are success stories, and Our Once and Future Planet delivers a fascinating account of one of the most impressive areas of current environmental experimentation and innovation: ecological restoration. Veteran investigative reporter Paddy Woodworth has spent years traveling the globe and talking with people—scientists, politicians, and ordinary citizens—who are working on the front lines of the battle against environmental degradation. At sites ranging from Mexico to New Zealand and Chicago to Cape Town, Woodworth shows us the striking successes (and a few humbling failures) of groups that are attempting to use cutting-edge science to restore blighted, polluted, and otherwise troubled landscapes to states of ecological health—and, in some of the most controversial cases, to particular moments in historical time, before widespread human intervention. His firsthand field reports and interviews with participants reveal the promise, power, and limitations of restoration. Ecological restoration alone won’t solve the myriad problems facing our environment. But Our Once and Future Planet demonstrates the role it can play, and the hope, inspiration, and new knowledge that can come from saving even one small patch of earth.
Download or read book The Future of the World written by Jenny Andersson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-25 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come. The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and futurists.
Download or read book Our World written by Anil K. Sarkar and published by 1st Book Library. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excellence in science and Technology Industrial revolution, over population, pollution of the environment, ethnic and religious conflicts are about to explode because man has not learned to tame and civilize the brute caveman in him. To save the human race from self-annihilation, the author is appealing to the conscience of the people who care for our fellow human beings
Download or read book This Could be Our Future written by Yancey Strickler and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the cofounder of Kickstarter comes a vision for building a society that looks beyond money and toward maximizing the values that make life worth living. Hopeful but firmly grounded, full of concrete solutions and bursting with creativity, this work brilliantly dissects the world we live in and shows us a road map to the world we are capable of making.
Download or read book The Ocean Our Future written by Independent World Commission on the Oceans and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Summarizes the problems affecting the oceans and their future governance, and provides imaginative solutions.
Download or read book Our Common Future written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Future Earth written by Eric Holthaus and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first hopeful book about climate change, The Future Earth shows readers how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. The basics of climate science are easy. We know it is entirely human-caused. Which means its solutions will be similarly human-led. In The Future Earth, leading climate change advocate and weather-related journalist Eric Holthaus (“the Rebel Nerd of Meteorology”—Rolling Stone) offers a radical vision of our future, specifically how to reverse the short- and long-term effects of climate change over the next three decades. Anchored by world-class reporting, interviews with futurists, climatologists, biologists, economists, and climate change activists, it shows what the world could look like if we implemented radical solutions on the scale of the crises we face. What could happen if we reduced carbon emissions by 50 percent in the next decade? What could living in a city look like in 2030? How could the world operate in 2040, if the proposed Green New Deal created a 100 percent net carbon-free economy in the United States? This is the book for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the current state of our environment. Hopeful and prophetic, The Future Earth invites us to imagine how we can reverse the effects of climate change in our own lifetime and encourages us to enter a deeper relationship with the earth as conscientious stewards and to re-affirm our commitment to one another in our shared humanity.
Download or read book The Future We Choose written by Christiana Figueres and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015. The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster.
Download or read book The Future of the World s Climate written by Ann Henderson-Sellers and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The study of climate today seems to be dominated by global warming, but these predictions of climatic models must be placed in their geological, paleo-climatic, and astronomical context to create a complete picture of the Earth's future climate. The Future of the World's Climate presents that perspective with data and projections that have emerged from more technologically advanced and accurate climate modeling"--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Back to Our Future written by David Sirota and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.
Download or read book Designed for the Future written by Jared Green and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Designed for the Future, author Jared Green asks eighty of today's most innovative architects, urban planners, landscape architects, journalists, artists, and environmental leaders the same question: what gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible? Their imaginative answers—covering everything from the cooling strategies employed at Cambodia's ancient temple city of Angkor Wat to the use of cutting-edge eco-friendly mushroom board as a replacement for Styrofoam—show the way to our future success on earth and begin a much-needed dialogue about what we can realistically accomplish in the decades ahead. Featuring an international roster of leading design thinkers including: • Biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus • Curator Barry Bergdoll • Educator and author Alan Berger • Environmentalist and author Lester Brown • Architect Rick Cook • Urban Planner Paul Farmer • Critic Christopher Hume • Architect Bjarke Ingels • Landscape designer Mia Lehrer • Architect Rob Rogers • Critic Inga Saffron • Artist Janet Echelman
Download or read book The Wild World of the Future written by Claire Pye and published by Firefly Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of international scientists, documentary film makers and animators are imagining the future based on present-day science.
Download or read book The Future written by Al Gore and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come. Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world: • Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past. • The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases. • The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets. • A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species. • Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands. • There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide. From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right. Praise for The Future “Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg “In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review “Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly “Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian
Download or read book Our Future written by Janet Wilson and published by Kids Making a Difference. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These young people from across the globe are raising awareness about what issues matter to them most. Jaelun Parkerson from Texas kneels with his football teammates during the National Anthem to protest racial injustice; Canadian Autumn Peltier spoke in front of the United Nations to raise awareness about water pollution; and Melati Wijsen from Bali started working at twelve-years-old to convince his government to ban plastic bags. From oil pipelines to cyber bullying, from gun violence to animal protection, they don't let their youth stop them from being heard.
Download or read book The New North written by Laurence Smith and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New North is a book that turns the world literally upside down. Analysing four key 'megatrends' - population growth and migration, natural resource demand, climate change and globalisation - UCLA professor Larry Smith projects a world that by mid-century will have shifted its political and economic axes radically to the north. The beneficiaries of this new order, based on a bonanza of oil, natural gas, minerals and plentiful water will be the Arctic regions of Russia, Alaska and Canada, and Scandinavia. Meanwhile countries closer to the equator will face water shortages, aging populations, crowded megacities and coastal flooding. Smith draws on geography, economics, history, earth and climate science, but what makes his arguments so compelling is that he has spent many months exploring the region, talking to people in once-inaccessible Arctic towns, noting their economies, politics and stories.
Download or read book EarthEd State of the World written by The Worldwatch Institute and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's students will face the unprecedented challenges of a rapidly warming world, including emerging diseases, food shortages, drought, and waterlogged cities. How do we prepare 9.5 billion people for life in the Anthropocene, to thrive in this uncharted and more chaotic future? Answers are being developed in universities, preschools, professional schools, and even prisons around the world. In the latest volume of State of the World, a diverse group of education experts share innovative approaches to teaching and learning in a new era. EarthEd will inspire anyone who wants to prepare students not only for the storms ahead but to become the next generation of sustainability leaders.
Download or read book Our Molecular Future written by Douglas Mulhall and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-01-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a vital book for those who care about the environment, society and deploying new technology to check the destructive power of humankind.- Allan Thornton, President, Environmental Investigation Agency, Washington, DC., and recipient of the Albert Schweitzer MedalThis book will shake conventional environmental wisdom to its roots. ... A landmark work that should be read by environmentalists and businesspersons alike.- Patrick Moore, cofounder, Greenpeace; president, GreenspiritIn Our Molecular Future [Mulhall] neatly outlines why our increasing ability to manipulate single atoms and molecules is a concern, and lays out the opportunities and threats this technology presents. And it''s surprisingly readable, unlike most of the nanobabble in the science journals. In the end, as Mulhall admits, he poses more questions than he answers. But that''s a good place to start.-New ScientistI just finished reading Douglas Mulhall''s outstanding new book Our Molecular Future . . . and I highly recommend it. Put this one at the top of your list! . . . In an easy to read format, with very few forays into geek-speak, Mulhall presents his well considered and thoroughly researched theories. Overall, an excellent overview for those who wish to understand how disruptive and enabling technologies may save us from ourselves and from mother nature. And along the way you will learn a lot about how nanoscale technologies may enhance our lives, provide abundance for all, and greatly raise the standard of living for everyone. . . . Rating: five stars out of five.- Rocky Rawstern, Nanotech NowWhat Alvin Toffler''s Future Shock was to the 20th century, Our Molecular Future will be to the 21st century.'What will happen to our jobs, health care, and investments when the molecular revolution hits?How might artificial intelligence transform our lives?How can molecular technologies help us cope with climate changes, earthquakes, and other extreme natural threats?Our Molecular Future explores some intriguing possibilities that answer these questions and many others. Douglas Mulhall describes the exponential changes that are about to be wrought by the nanotechnology and robotic revolutions, which promise to reduce the scale of computing to the nanometerùa billionth of a meterùwhile increasing computing power to almost unimaginable levels.The resulting convergence of genetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence may give us hitherto undreamed-of capacities to transform our environment and ourselves. In the not-so-distant future, our world may include machines that scour our arteries to prevent heart disease, cars and clothes that change color at our whim, exotic products built in our own desktop factories, and enhancements to our personal financial security despite greatly accelerated obsolescence.But while technology is making these fantastic leaps, we may also encounter surprises that throw us into disarray: climate changes, earthquakes, or even a seemingly improbable asteroid collision. These extremes are not the nightmare scenarios of sensationalists, Mulhall stresses, nor are many of them human induced. Instead, they may be part of nature''s cycleùrecurring more often than we''ve thought possible.The good news is that this convergence of catastrophe and technological transformation may work to our advantage. If we''re smart, according to Mulhall, we can use molecular machines to protect ourselves from nature''s worst extremes, and harness their potential benefits to usher in an economic renaissance.This visionary link between future technology and past disasters is a valuable guide for every one of us who wants to be prepared for the twenty-first century.Further Praise for OUR MOLECULAR FUTURE:A provocative and profoundly convincing message from the future.- Graham Hancock, archaeological journalist and author of Fingerprints of the GodsIn a breezy, journalistic style, Our Molecular Future takes us on a tour through some of the issues that will preoccupy ma
