Our planet is approaching a critical environmental juncture. Across the globe we continue to deplete the five pools of carbon – soil, wood, coal, oil, and natural gas – at an unsustainable rate. We've burned up half the planet's known reserves of oil – one trillion barrels – in less than a century. When these sources of energy–rich carbon go into severe decline, as they surely will, society will follow. Former archeologist and Sierra Club activist Courtney White calls this moment the Age of Consequences—a time when the worrying consequences of our environmental actions– or inaction – have begun to raise unavoidable and difficult questions. How should we respond? What are effective (and realistic) solutions? In exploring these questions, White draws on his formidable experience as an environmentalist and activist as well as his experience as a father to two children living through this vital moment in time. As a result, The Age of Consequences is a book of ideas and action, but it is also a chronicle of personal experience. Readers follow White as he travels the country ––– from Kansas to Los Angeles, New York City, Italy, France, Yellowstone, and New England.

Garth Martens’ debut, Prologue for the Age of Consequence, is about the tar sands and industrial projects of Alberta, and the men who work in them. But to describe it as such restricts the book to its physical concerns, when in fact these are poems of great philosophical ambition, and startling ethical and psychological reach. Martens has made an elemental world both beautiful and severe, and on his stage, characters assume a collective status both emphatically human and radically mythic. He is interested in endurance, in addiction, loss, abuse, and pain, in how people are created, and how they create themselves, out of crude material both inherited, and scavenged. His language is rough and baroque; his metaphors are titanic in their range and scope. This is a book about grace and error, about hurtling towards the unknown, about acting out. Martens writes: "It is dark when you reach the excavation and you don't know if the road starts or ends here. If it's abutment, chimera, hole." Prologue for the Age of Consequence accrues the propulsive force of an epic. It will pry you open, and reorder what it finds inside.

Originally intended as an examination of the rise and fall of the state hospital system, Matthew Christopher's Abandoned America rapidly grew to encompass derelict factories and industrial sites, schools, churches, power plants, hospitals, prisons, military installations, hotels, resorts, homes, and more.

With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme, they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are burning on several continents, the Earth’s ice sheets are melting and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet’s coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and humans live and grow food. With the exception of birds like hawks, black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex, with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon’s Last and first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support system.”

"Presents three scenarios of what the future may hold: expected, severe, and catastrophic and analyzes the security implications of each. Considers what can be learned from early civilizations confronted with natural disaster and asks what the largest emitters of greenhouse gases can do to reduce and manage future risks"--Provided by publisher.

After reflecting on his support of a losing Democrat for president, George Soros steps back to revisit his views on why George Bush's policies around the world fall short in the arenas most important to Soros: democracy, human rights and open society. As a survivor of the Holocaust and a life-long proponent of free expression, Soros understands the meaning of freedom. And yet his differences with George Bush, another proponent of freedom, are profound. In this powerful essay Soros spells out his views and how they differ from the president's. He reflects on why the Democrats may have lost the high ground on these values issues and how they might reclaim it. As he has in his recent books, On Globalization and The Bubble of American Supremacy , Soros uses facts, anecdotes, personal experience and philosophy to illuminate a major topic in a way that both enlightens and inspires.

“A plethora of insights about nature and ourselves, revealed by one man’s journey as he comes to terms with human exploitation of our planet.” —Dr. James Hansen, climate scientist and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Life on one-tenth the fossil fuels turns out to be awesome. We all want to be happy. Yet as we consume ever more in a frantic bid for happiness, global warming worsens. Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process. Being the Change explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a satisfying and appropriate response to global warming. Part one exposes our interconnected predicament: overpopulation, global warming, industrial agriculture, growth-addicted economics, a sold-out political system, and a mindset of separation from nature. It also includes a readable but authoritative overview of climate science. Part two offers a response at once obvious and unprecedented: mindfully opting out of this broken system and aligning our daily lives with the biosphere. The core message is deeply optimistic: living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better. “In this timely and provocative book, Peter Kalmus points out that changing the world has to start with changing our own lives. It’s a crucial message that needs to be heard.” —John Michael Greer, author of After Progress and The Retro Future