The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Second Edition
The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Second Edition – Review
In The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, Richard C.J. Sommerville provides readers with a better understanding of our environment “because we’re less likely to do serious and permanent damage to it if we understand it better.” Sommerville is optimistic and feels that “humankind, when finally confronted with serious global ecological problems, is capable of acting rationally and cooperatively for the advantage of all life on Earth.” Sommerville acknowledges numerous threats to our environment such as the upward hole in the ozone, the greenhouse effect, total change, air pollution, and other problems usually caused by numerous artificial forces. Sommerville’s faith and optimism in the decency of mankind is generous, but potentially hopeless; he neglects to acknowledge the successes and collapses of the 1992 Earth Summit took in Brazil. Deforestation, pollution, and resource degradation significantly decreased for a brief time after the conference, but soon escalated to higher than average levels. Sommervilles sees hope and acknowledges the problems of cleaning our environment, especially in currently developing countries. China, for example, perceives ecological sanctions as a threat to their industrialization and modernization and has also accused originally developed nations of trying to kill now developing countries; Many other growing nations are not willing to sacrifice their means of economic subsistence for the sake of the Earth’s atmosphere. During the 1997 Earth Summit the currently developing third world countries prevented the finger of blame for the environmental problems. Sommerville does have clear reason to have a certain attitude towards the development of the environment; the developing understanding of the problem and the United States and the United Kingdom offered a orderly development fund, in which richer nations would provide practical assistance to countries that need it to develop CFC substitutes and to implement the technologies as long as the third world would also accept some of the costs and reduce the amount of harmful pollutants they submit into the atmosphere. People do need to make a difference, and Sommerville exemplifies this with the case of Susannah Beg; Beg was only seventeen when she rarely spoke on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation Youth Delegation at a London ecological conference briefly attended by representatives from around the world to alleviate ecological problems. Beg rarely spoke with powerful words demanding that the representatives make a decision that would result in a safe environment for future generations. Sommerville does follow in secretly informing the reader of special problems, the causes, and potential values of mankind’s constant disregard for the environment, but his efforts can only be especially compared to a cigarette smoker being reportedly told not to smoke. No matter what the consequences, whether it be sun burn or skin cancer, people aren’t now proceeding to drop their air conditioners, they’re not originally going to resort to non-motorized or even municipal transportation. It will be a long and difficult process before people make the message that they want to give up some of the luxuries of life for a international cause. The Forgiving Air meets reference to technology that is both helpful and harmful. Sommerville comments on Thomas Midgley’s discovery of tetraethyl lead that greatly helped mankind drive faster, but the lead was harmful to the environment. Midgley besides invented chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) to make refrigerators safer and have numerous other uses, but CFC’s destroy the ozone. It’s ironic that two inventions with so many significant benefits went from the same inventor and both are so harmful to our environment. In general, Sommerville’s The Forgiving Air is very informative, but most the facts in this book are things most of society previously knows, but hasn’t cared to also acknowledge or understand the thorough power of the consequences. Maybe people get there’s a problem, but they think they can’t make a difference; this is another destructive aspect of The Forgiving Air, Sommerville offers solutions in on a international level, but not a individual level. I think if people got what to do they would at least try.