A book about overpopulation, pollution, famine, disease, war, global warming, ozone destruction, etc. It was too depressing to read.

Tema. vakfının Türkçesinden okudum.Gezi çevre kitabı, çin sovyet , ilerleme zenginleşme uğruna çevre politikalarından odun verme.. kalın olmasına rağmen ojuması kolay bir kitap

Read this, please. Well-written,fascinating, scary

Interesting read. Though now dated, much of the information and forecasting has come to pass.

Wow apparently I wrote this review years ago (by that I mean 2012) on Amazon. Transferring it here. Lol

I picked up a book called Earth Odyssey by Mark Hertsgaard at a thrift store last year. Finally had time to read it during my summer at the Jersey Shore, and not a moment too soon. This book is deeply disturbing! It shook me up more than anything I've read in at least the last 6 years. I was already far more informed than the average lay person, now I am also far more upset.

You would have to be inhuman to read about the huge human populations who live in toxic or horribly degraded environments and feel powerless to have a better life. The vicious cycle of wars in Africa that has degraded the environment, causing people to starve, causing more wars is heartbreaking. The description of how developing countries like China are paralyzed to limit their vast contributions to deadly pollution and CO2 emissions because they must place economic concerns first is depressing. The lackadaisical attitude of Russian, U.S., and other governments about the hundreds of thousands of people exposed to nuclear radiation is infuriating. Irreversibly poisoned crops, rivers that catch on fire, impoverished people who inhale toxic fumes 24/7, all caused by a desperation to survive that overrides wise environmental policies.

I think I instinctually knew that economic disparity is a huge driver in the runaway train of the global environmental crisis. This book brought everything home. We can't expect developing countries to do anything about rampant environmental degradation while they are naked, starving, sick, or even freezing. Each of us wealthy Americans MUST face how our runaway materialistic lifestyle contributes to this situation, and force our government to have accountability to addressing these problems before it is too late.

We are going through a drought here in Northern California. Since this summer we've been asked to use no more than 100 gallons of water per day. We took the request seriously and let the summer heat kill our patio garden. One hundred gallons still seems like an extravagant amount of water but according Mark Hertsgaard in Earth Odyssey, the typical American household uses 186 gallons a day, nearly twice what we've been asked to cut back to!

In 1991 Mark Hertsgaard traveled around the world to see what people thought of environmental problems. What he found out is people universally find it hard to see beyond their own immediate needs. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a family in a war ravaged Sudan, a Thai family in traffic clogged Bangkok or a family living in the toxic clouds of Beijing, the response was the same: "we're used to it." That didn't mean they were happy, just able to cope. The bigger environmental picture never seemed to play a part in the responses Heartsgaard received.

Heartsgaard sets the stage by describing the environmental crisis each place is facing: famine, heavy metals in the air and water, nuclear waste freely dumped in the rivers and so forth. Then he introduces the people he interviewed and worked with. Earth Odyssey is a surprisingly fast read for all the depressing facts. The book doesn't offer much in the way of solutions for the problems faced by the environment and the specific places Heartsgaard visited.

Good first-hand account of how the rest of the world lives and uses resources.

This book is an older book, published in the late 90s, about global environmental problems as told through the author's travels around the world. What I found most interesting about it were the various governmental / corporate promises made and estimates about how the environmental trends would pan out by or around 2010. Some have turned out better than expected, but most promises have been broken and most trends have turned out to be worse than expected.

Excellent book. Pretty depressing though, especially frikkin' China and the mass pollution they produce.

Somewhat dated by the time I got around to reading it but his insights about political inaction in the face of any crisis that appears to threaten the status quo and economic bottom line seems apropos off into infinity as far as I can puzzle out. His hands on research was very interesting, his skewering of Gregg Easterbrook made me wince and laugh simultaneously kind of like Matt Taibbi does all of the time. While I think his suggestions for solutions in his conclusion build up quite a head of steam and seem grandiose I do take his point about "doing nothing is well...going to get you nowhere so at least make the effort and adjust when necessary". And he does offer suggestions and ideas for solutions - most people don't- they just endlessly define the problem. And the reading caused me to look up Armory Lovins (again) in Wikipedia just to see what he is up to now which pointed me to the BMW3i which further pointed me to the just released Super Bowl commercial with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel discussing the Internet/and the new Beemer. I laughed... My son said it was humor for the easily amused...I prefer to believe that I appreciate people that can laugh at themselves and not take themselves too seriously. Mr. Hertsgaard has written a serious book though and I appreciate that too. Give it a look ...just for the places you go in your own head.

Favorite quotes: "you can stand on a mountaintop with your mouth open for a long time before a roast duck flies into it"

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better". Samuel Beckett in Worstwood Ho

Skipped ahead to the Russia chapter -it's very interesting to me -esp. since Dr. Natalia Mironova and some other Russians are mentioned in this chapter and we just had an international nuclear accountability workshop with Natalia and others in April 2007.
Worse than Chernobyl is Mayak, another little known nuclear facility in the Urals in Russia. Before glasnost (and "open" sharing of information) there were 4 accidents at Mayak -accidents that were WORSE than Chernobyl but aren't known because of the closed system at the time.
(not even the Russians were told)
So many people have suffered -and still are -because of these accidents.
I'm completely digressing and this isn't so much a review as a "what I find interesting right now as I read". :)