"The world is facing incredibly serious natural resource and environmental challenges: Climate change, fresh water depletion, ocean over-fishing, deforestation, air and water pollution, the struggle to feed a planet of billions."
So begins a two-part guest blog post from Ramez Naam, on Scientific American's website, challenging conventional views on the limits of the carrying capacity of the Earth.
His new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, addresses the five basic problems that we face if the human race is to continue living successfully on the planet.
Part one outlines them as: feeding the world, deforestation, fresh water, ocean overfishing and climate change. Part two offers a plan to deal with each.
In her seminal work, Patterns of Culture, the great cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that no civilization had ever woken up and realized that they could change the laws and rules by which they lived, that they could change the very culture that defined their ideas and behavior. The 1960s proved that idea wrong, but also showed the deep intransigence of any challenged culture. So deep in fact, that the so called culture war is still being fought today. The polarization of American politics is proof of that.
Whether we will fix our problems or they will fix us, as Sherlock Holmes once said, "The game is afoot."
His new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, addresses the five basic problems that we face if the human race is to continue living successfully on the planet.
Part one outlines them as: feeding the world, deforestation, fresh water, ocean overfishing and climate change. Part two offers a plan to deal with each.
In her seminal work, Patterns of Culture, the great cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that no civilization had ever woken up and realized that they could change the laws and rules by which they lived, that they could change the very culture that defined their ideas and behavior. The 1960s proved that idea wrong, but also showed the deep intransigence of any challenged culture. So deep in fact, that the so called culture war is still being fought today. The polarization of American politics is proof of that.
Whether we will fix our problems or they will fix us, as Sherlock Holmes once said, "The game is afoot."
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