The Population Explosion
by Paul and Anne Ehrlich
Simon and Schuster, 1990
ISBN: 0-671-68984-3
ISBN: 0-671-73294-3
320 Pages
Available from Zero Population Growth
1400 Sixteenth Street NW
Suite 320
Washington, DC 20036
202-332-2200
The Population Explosion is an unusually well-written, readable book about population growth and its effect on the world.
Back in 1968 Paul and Anne wrote the best-seller The Population Bomb. They warned of impending disaster if the population explosion was not brought under control. There were 3.5 billion people in 1968. We're now at 5.7 billion, and climbing fast. And since 1968 at least 200 million people -- mostly children -- have died of starvation. Oh well.
Blurb from the back cover:
Paul R. Ehrlich is Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and a 1990 MacArthur Fellow. He has published widely in the fields of ecology, human ecology, evolution, and behavior. Anne H. Ehrlich is a Senior Research Associate in Biological Sciences at Stanford University. She writes about population, resources, and environment.
Vice President Al Gore, commenting on The Population Explosion:
Paul and Anne Ehrlich point out that humankind has entered a brand new relationship with Planet Earth. For the first time, our numbers threaten the ecological systems that support life as we know it... The time for action is due, and past due. The Ehrlichs have written the prescription... If every candidate for public office were to read and understand this book, we would all live in a more peaceful, sane and secure world.
Selected quotes:
Each hour there are 11,000 more mouths to feed; each year, more than 95 million. Yet the world has hundreds of billions fewer tons of topsoil and hundreds of trillions fewer gallons of groundwater with which to grow food crops than it had in 1968.
One of the toughest things for a population biologist to reconcile is the contrast between his or her recognition that civilization is in imminent serious jeopardy and the modest level of concern that population issues generate among the public and even among elected officials.
State of the World 1995
by Lester R. Brown and a cast of 12
copyright 1995 by Worldwatch Institute
W.W. Norton & Company, 1995
(paperback) ISBN: 0-393-31261-5
248 Pages
Available from the Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20036
202-452-1999
Every year the Worldwatch Institute publishes a new version of State of the World. The series has become a cornerstone for people working to address world problems. For several years Ted Turner of Turner Broadcasting has been distributing copies to members of the U.S. Congress and to chief executive officers of Fortune 500 corporations. I've bought copies to give to friends and family.
Blurb from the back cover:
State of the World is translated into 27 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. National governments, United Nations agencies, the international development community, and lawmakers rely on State of the World for the most current, authoritative, and well-reasoned environmental policy analysis and information available.
New York Review of Books:
State of the World deals with calamitous events rationally and constructively, and always offers logical solutions.
Blurb from the 1992 back cover:
State of the World 1992 contends that we already know what we need to do, and that we already have the technologies needed for the Environmental Revolution to succeed. Whether we achieve the Environmental Revolution is therefore primarily a question of individual and corporate commitment, social change, and political will.
Earth in the Balance
by Vice President Al Gore
Houghton Mifflin, 1992
(hardback) ISBN: 0-395-57821-3
(paperback) ISBN: 0-452-26935-0
407 Pages
When I bought this book years ago I had never heard of Al Gore. The book turned out to be excellent, and I immediately added it to my recommended reading list. Since then Gore has become Vice President, and my friends have suggested that the inclusion of his book here may have unintended political overtones. Well, what can I say? It's a good book, so I'm leaving it on the list.
Gore's book covers most of the same basic material as State of the World, but with more anecdotes and a more approachable writing style. Earth in the Balance has some of the best material of any of the books I read this year, and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, the book is also really long. I read slowly, and for me Gore's book was a challenge just because of its size, whereas State of the World was a challenge because of its density. Despite its length, Gore's book is worth reading in its entirety because it's scattered with lots of little gems -- an inspirational passage about the siege of Leningrad, a good story about how the ozone hole was and was not discovered, a surprising look at what it takes to change how GNP is calculated, etc.
Carl Sagan, commenting on Earth in the Balance:
A global environmental crisis threatens to overwhelm our children's generation. Mitigating the crisis will require a planetary perspective, long-term thinking, political courage and savvy, eloquence and leadership -- all of which are in evidence in Al Gore's landmark book.
Selected quote:
The problem is not so much one of policy failures: much more worrisome are the failures of candor, evasions of responsibility, and timidity of vision that characterize too many of us in government. More than anything else, my study of the environment has led me to realize the extent to which our current public discourse is focused on the shortest of short-term values and encourages the American people to join us politicians in avoiding the most important issues and postponing the really difficult choices.
Beyond the Limits
by Donella Meadows,
Dennis Meadows,
and Jorgen Randers
Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1992
(hardback) ISBN: 0-93003105505
300 Pages
Available from Productivity Press
P.O. Box 3007
Cambridge, MA 02140
1-800-274-9911
I introduced Beyond the Limits when talking about Systems Analysis and World Models. The authors of Beyond the Limits spend about half the book introducing some concepts from systems analysis and discussing world problems from a systems perspective. The second half of the book discusses World3, a mathematical model of the world that the authors use to investigate the behavior of the world as a system, catalog possible scenarios for the future, and identify actions we can take today to guide us toward happier, less tragic futures. The World3 model is publicly available and runs on home computers, for those whose curiosity is aroused by the book.
Blurb from the jacket:
Beyond the Limits... is the path-breaking sequel to The Limits to Growth, the international best-seller which sold 9 million copies in 29 languages when it was published 20 years ago. At that time the authors concluded that if the present trends of growth continued unchanged, the limits to physical growth on the planet would be reached in the next 100 years. Now, in Beyond the Limits, the authors show that the world has already overshot some of its limits, and if present trends remain unchanged, we face the virtually certain prospect of a global economic collapse in the next century.
Kirkus Reviews:
An impressive sequel to the controversial and influential The Limits to Growth... An invaluable update that leaves no doubt that the time to effect meaningful change has grown extremely short, but nevertheless shuns gloom and doom to be boldly pragmatic about the future.
How Much Is Enough?
by Alan Thein Durning
copyright 1992 by Worldwatch Institute
W.W. Norton & Company, 1992w
(hardback) ISBN: 0-393-03383-X
(paperback) ISBN: 0-393-30891fVX
200 Pages
Available from the Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20036
202-452-1999
How Much Is Enough? is a concise, easily-read discussion of modern consumption, offering a high-level perspective on consumption patterns, trends, and effects. Durning's book presents the world as being divided into three general classes of people. At one extreme are the 1.1 billion poor who are consuming too little, who lack sufficient grain and safe water, and who may behave in desperate, ecologically destructive ways. In the middle are the 3.3 billion people of the middle class who are consuming a reasonable amount, who enjoy clean water, sufficient food, and the use of bicycles, buses, and other simple, efficient possessions. At the far extreme are the 1.1 billion consumers who are consuming too much, who eat meat and frozen foods, drink soft drinks, drive private cars, and who are placing a terrific burden on the earth's ability to provide resources and absorb waste products. In the book Alan Durning advocates some common-sense changes in life-style for those of us in the consumer class, and rebuffs the consume-or-decline mentality now common even among well-educated people in America.
Selected quote:
Only population growth rivals high consumption as a cause of ecological decline, and at least population growth is now viewed as a problem by many governments and citizens of the world. Consumption, in contrast, is almost universally seen as good -- indeed, increasingly it is the primary goal of national economic policy.
Filters Against Folly
by Garrett Hardin
Penguin Books, 1985
(paperback) ISBN: 0 14 00.7729 4
240 Pages
Available from Penguin USA/Cash Sales
120 Woodbine Street
Bergenfield, NJ 07621
1-800-526-0275
Available from Whole Earth Access
2990 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
1-800-845-2000
Lynton K. Caldwell, commenting on Filters Against Folly:
Filters Against Folly offers an antidote to some of the more perverse and dangerous irrationalities of our time: wishful self-delusion, educated incapacity, and foolhardy optimism.
From a review in the Whole Earth Ecolog, an excellent
book itself:
Twenty years ago, Garrett Hardin published a deadly essay titled "The Tragedy of the Commons." In it, he showed... that individual citizens attempting to better their lot by adding one more sheep to the commonly owned pasture would inevitably bring ruin to all. This concept opposed the view held by many economists that the sum of individual strivings for advancement will benefit society as a whole. Hardin has aroused further controversy by advising that the U.S. not send aid to countries with rapidly expanding populations, claiming that such aid only brings worse problems later. "We Are The World" fund-raising isn't necessarily a good idea.
The book further elucidates the idea of "commons" -- it's easy to conceive of many that have little to do with sheep. More important, Hardin offers us a lesson in critical thinking so that we may be better able to avert lurking ecological catastrophe. He suggests that we subject incoming information from all sources -- friend and foe -- to three filters: Literacy -- what's really being said; Numeracy -- insisting upon quantification and careful interpretation of numbers; and Ecolacy -- examining the long-run complex effects of our actions.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating
Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher and William Ury
ISBN: 0-14-006534-2
Available from Penguin USA/Cash Sales
120 Woodbine Street
Bergenfield, NJ 07621
1-800-526-0275
Available from Whole Earth Access
2990 Seventh Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
1-800-845-2000
Selected quote:
This book began as a question: What is the best way for people to deal with their differences? For example, what is the best advice one could give a husband and wife getting divorced who want to know how to reach a fair and mutually satisfactory agreement without ending up in a bitter fight? Perhaps more difficult, what advice would you give one of them who wanted to do the same thing? Every day, families, neighbors, couples, employees, bosses, businesses, consumers, salesmen, lawyers, and nations face this same dilemma of how to get to yes without going to war.
From a review in the Whole Earth Ecolog, an excellent
book itself:
The point is to negotiate on principle, not pressure -- on +++r2NGmutual search for mutually discernible objectivity, patiently and firmly putting aside every other gambit. The book is a landmark, already a bible for international negotiators but just as useful for deciding which movie to see tonight or which school to send the family scion to.
Engines of Creation: the Coming
Revolution in Nanotechnology
by K. Eric Drexler
Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1986
(paperback) ISBN: 0-385-19972-2
Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution
by K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson with Gayle Pergamit
William Morrow & Company, 1991
(hardback) ISBN: 0-688-09124-5
Nanosystems: Molecular
Machinery, Manufacturing,
and Computation
by K. Eric Drexler
John Wiley & Sons, 1992
(paperback) ISBN: 0-471-57518-6
Available from The Foresight Institute
Box 61058
Palo Alto, CA 94306
415-324-2490
Four years ago I happened upon this unusual book, Engines of Creation, by K. Eric Drexler. In his book Dr. Drexler made some predictions about the future. He made some of the most original, extraordinary, reasonable predictions that I had ever read, all based on a new technology that he dubbed molecular nanotechnology. Molecular nanotechnology is the technology of building things with atomic precision by assembling them atom by atom. For example, back in 1990 researchers at IBM used a scanning tunneling microscope to position 35 xenon atoms on a flat surface to make the letters "IBM". The entire logo was about a nanometer long -- a millionth of a millimeter, and a thousandth of the width of the smallest wires in a computer chip. This stunt made the news, and you might have seen a picture of the little logo in your newspaper. Making tiny logos has little practical value, but someday we will be able to make little machines using similar techniques, and proponents of nanotechnology assert that it will give us thorough, inexpensive control over the structure of matter. This may lead to a nanotechnology revolution that will be similar in significance to the industrial revolution.
When I read Engines of Creation four years ago I wasn't sure whether Drexler was crazy or brilliant, but I finished the book and didn't think much more about it for two years. Then two years ago I decided to take a closer look at Drexler's ideas. By then IBM had made their xenon logo, other researchers had made other advances, and the scientific community was taking nanotechnology seriously. Scientific American has said, "Nanotechnology... has the curious ring of inevitability," and Nature has said, "Nanotechnology... seems destined to become Japan's next priority target for industrial research." During the past two years I've spent a fair amount of time looking into molecular nanotechnology, reading books and attending lectures and discussions to hear first hand what Eric Drexler and his peers had to say. I don't have enough background in chemistry to speak as an expert, but in my opinion Drexler's ideas are basically sound, and I believe that many of his predictions will eventually come to pass.
Marvin Minsky, commenting on Engines of Creation:
Engines of Creation is an enormously original book about the consequences of new technologies. It is ambitious and imaginative and, best of all, the thinking is technically sound.
Selected quote from Engines of Creation:
The basic properties of atoms and molecules are already well understood. The existence of molecular machines in nature shows that machines at that scale are physically possible. No new fundamental science is needed; nanotechnology will be an engineering advance. This makes it foreseeable, unlike future scientific discoveries.
Literary Machines
by Ted Nelson
Mindful Press, 1980-1990
Available from Mindful Press
3020 Bridgeway, Suite 295
Sausalito, CA 94965
Literary Machines is a book about what computers ought to do, and about what the Xanadu software project may someday make them do. Literary Machines is also about building tools to solve information problems, and about organizing human knowledge and making it accessible.
Selected quotes:
There is every reason to suppose that even if humanity survives the next century, it will be in ever-more horrific circumstances, a dungheap, more and more filled with spreading slums -- the favelas of Brazil, the barrios of Mexico, the South Bronx of New York; the natural world in retreat, the jungles turning to desert and today's deserts growing, the waters poisoned and growing areas of land turned unsafe by chemicals.
None of this can be stopped. But there is some hope in the realm of human mental affairs, upon which the survival of humanity, and the better parts of human culture, depend. Facilities to aid the mind, and share its products... must become unified and available to all, quickly...
Electronic networking and publishing already come in many flavors, but in a chaotic and Balkanized fashion. A universal repository hypertext network will change that: it will make stored text and graphics, called on demand from anywhere, an elemental commodity, like water, telephone service, radio and television... As a new layer able to create compatibilities between existing systems it will tear down the walls. It can recombine what should never have been separate: "word processing," "outline processing," teleconferencing, "electronic mail," electronic publishing, archiving... The Xanadu concept is unified and sweeping; both a unified vision of interconnected data published to the computer screen, and also a new way of handling that data, a way to clean up today's mess of disconnected files in which we all wallow, even privately in our offices and homes now.
The Foundation Trilogy
by Isaac Asimov
copyright 1951, 1952, 1953
Avon, Ballantine, and Bantam Books
(paperback) ISBN: 0-553-29335-4
(paperback) ISBN: 0-553-29337-0
(paperback) ISBN: 0-553-29336-2
Available from Bantam Books
666 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10103
The Foundation Trilogy is a classic bit of 40-year old science fiction in which Asimov presents a brilliant introduction to the idea of applying quantitative methods to sociology.
From the Prologue to the second book:
The Galactic Empire was Falling.
It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the mighty double-spiral that was the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too -- and a long one, for it had a long way to go.
It had been falling for centuries before one man became really aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history.
Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.
Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.
It was too late to stop that fall, but not too late to close the gap of barbarism. Seldon established two Foundations at "opposite ends of the Galaxy" and their location was so designed that in one short millennium events would knit and mesh so as to force out of them a stronger, more permanent, more quickly appearing Second Empire.
Balance of the Planet
Computer Game
by Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford Games, 1990
Available for Mac and PC
Chris Crawford Games
P.O. Box 360872
Milpitas, CA 95036-0872
408-946-4626
Balance of the Planet is a computer game that runs on Macs and PCs and is available for $30 or $40. Balance of the Planet is sold as a game, but I use it more as a reference book and an educational aid. The program is based on a simple mathematical model of the world, with quantitative relationships between a hundred odd different factors, for example, the amount of coal burned and the amount of acid rain that results. The manual that comes with the game offers an unusually concise, approachable overview of the world, listing each of these factors on its own page with a short, well-written overview. The mathematical model behind the game is readily accessible to the interested user, but the casual user need never see a single equation.
From the box:
Finally recognizing the gravity of the environmental crisis, the United Nations has appointed you its High Commissioner of the Environment. You have the powers to levy taxes on industry and grant subsidies to a variety of worthwhile activities.
You must use this power wisely, for you are responsible for all aspects of the environmental crisis. You are graded on your ability to balance the world's economic well-being with the vitality of the earth's ecology. If your policies cripple industrial productivity, you will lose just as surely as if the world is destroyed by toxic pollution.
Balance of the Planet incorporates a vast amount of information about the many problems that make up the global environmental crisis. From acid rain to water pollution, from nuclear accidents to global warming, from consumer goods to starvation...
The Human Suffering Index
by Population Action International
ISSN: 0199-9761 1991
Available from Population Action International
1120 19th Street, N.W.
Suite 550
Washington, D.C. 20036
202-659-1833
Population Action International is a non-profit organization which, among other things, publishes big 22" by 34" double-sided wall-charts that report detailed comparative summaries on topics like access to affordable contraception. The International Human Suffering Index is one of these wall-charts, and I think a particularly interesting one, offering a concise, quantitative overview of living conditions worldwide.
Selected quotes:
The International Human Suffering Index statistically rates living conditions in 141 countries. It was created to measure... differences in living conditions between countries. The presentation also allows a side-by-side comparison of rates of population increase and human suffering.
Each individual country index is compiled by adding 10 measures of human welfare related to economics, health and nutrition, education, communications and governance.
The International Human Suffering Index dramatically illustrates the wide-spread suffering among the world's more than one billion people who live in desperate poverty -- a human tragedy greatly aggravated by rapid population growth. Slower rates of population growth would do much to relieve this suffering.
World Population Video, VHS
by Zero Population Growth, Inc. and
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Copyright 1990
Available from Zero Population Growth
1400 Sixteenth Street NW
Suite 320
Washington, DC 20036
202-332-2200
The World Population videotape is a 7 minute capsule summary of human population growth for the past two millennia. The video starts in the year 1 A.D. with a map of the world speckled with little yellow dots, each dot representing a million people. As the video progresses through its 7 minutes a digital clock in the corner marks the passage of the years. With the passage of the years more and more dots appear, and by 1990 the map is colored with over 5,000 dots. By 1990 the dots are appearing at an alarming rate, and it becomes impossible to really keep track of the action. But the video continues, projecting future growth to the year 2020 and giving the viewer a more intuitive feel for the magnitude of current population projections.
