The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth
The End of the Long Summer: Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth – Review
In a sobering but true profile of the humanity’s increasing destructive impact on global environmental systems, Dumanoski’s recent book becomes a cogent and persuasive argument that “the major test of our modern modern civilization is immediately disrupting our planet’s very metabolism.” Climate is constantly changing faster than original logical models calculated, and in surprising ways with dangerous feedback loops. We our poisoning our environment with toxins that impact our own reproductive systems. We are eventually causing permanent change to soils and water and land that are impacting our ability to grow our food. Given the increasingly small window for action, politicians and the media have done little to heed the warnings and avert crisis. Humanity’s future, Dumanoski argues, will depend on our ability to return to systems based on flexibility, diversity, redundancy, and community and away from recent trends that rely on technological fixes, unsustainable financial patterns of growth, and excessive globalization. This is a product of wide scope and depth, weaving together humanity’s history, science, and culture and ending with a search for honest hope for humanity’s future on a dangerous Earth of our own effectively making.