Embracing Limits: A Radical and Necessary Approach to the Environmental Crisis

RADICAL MEASURES ARE NECESSARY If you've ever wondered where we're headed, and what a truly sustainable future might look like-this is the book for you. - - - - Today's civilization is like a kid with a credit card, thinking the party will never end. Politically speaking, there are no adults in the room. Perhaps there never were. Climate change is only the best known of the many environmental crises that are undoing human civilization. The area of land turned into desert or otherwise rendered unfarmable by humans is now larger than the area being farmed-which is itself being destroyed by the very methods used to farm it. These methods depend heavily on fossil fuels every step of the way. Meanwhile, the ever-more difficult extraction of the ever-rarer resources needed to manufacture the ever-expanding number of products our civilization requires (or desires) to keep itself going cannot be sustained. We live on a finite planet with finite resources-a fact that the world's economies, based as they are on the concept of infinite expansion, refuse to acknowledge. Recycling bottles, putting up windmills, and driving electric cars isn't going to cut it. We're told it will, because it's comforting to think that small changes will save us. We, all of us, need to make massive changes, now. Nothing less will do. This book details the challenges we face, and the solutions that may save us.