DOCSLIB.ORG

The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1St Edition Download Free

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1St Edition Download Free THE GOD SPECIES SAVING THE PLANET IN THE AGE OF HUMANS 1ST EDITION DOWNLOAD FREE Mark Lynas | 9781426208911 | | | | | Mark Lynas I've been recommending this book to everyone, and I recommend it to you, too. Okay, this is going to be a long review, since I will collect almost all of my blog posts on this book I did last year on Lenz Blog. He gets 2 stars--one for nuclear power and one for promoting genetically modified food as a "green" technology. Three large rocky planets orbit the star at the center of our solar system: Venus, Earth, and Mars. This latter position was attacked as patronising and naive by some developing world commentators, including one featured in a Channel Four debate after the programme aired. Rather importantly, it puts climate change in the context of a larger global set of problems that need highlighting. Or that in comparison to the electricity actually consumed in France the generation percentage of nuclear and renewable energy is already over percent. If the German government had had its way, all of Tokyo would have been evacuated. This attitude pervades his book, and he reserves most of his ire for leftists who continue to take anti-science positions on key environmental issues. You will get thumb-ache reading this edition through the night. We have wiped out countless species and are now heating the planet, poisoning the oceans, and transforming the atmosphere. But their convenient fictions chime with the thinking of the new establishment: corporations, thinktanks, neoliberal politicians. As mentioned before, the Fukushima accident would be a good opportunity to just dump a lot of low-level radioactive water in the sea and then use the hysterical irrational fear of radiation to declare a large area around the site completely off limits for fishers. Not one of the most enjoyable books I've read recently, but certainly one of the most important. Unless you are going to allow yourself to pull the same cherry-picking tricks as the climate-change deniers, you will need to allow that his is a set of conclusions grounded in the best science available. This article needs additional citations The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition verification. There are no discussion topics on this book yet. These propose specific limits on carbon dioxide emissions, farming land use, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, and ocean acidification. For one, generation and consumption would all be done in one stable industrialised country. Advocate for nuclear power. The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition must read for those who crave a pragmatic outlook on the issues. If people want fuel efficient cars, they will buy them and they do--hello, Prius C. But it will demand an aggressively pragmatic and bold attitude to get us there. This dazzling The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition collection reveals exquisite moments in time held still. The prescriptions in this book will anger some environmentalists, in spite of the author's sterling environmental credentials. Again, the climate boundary is the most important of them all. For example: 1. I'll stop there, but the list goes on. This post will discuss one point made in chapter six water. Let's have an honest debate about the best ways to accomplish things. National Geographic Stunning Photographs. This is why I want to see more nuclear power in the UK and elsewhere, in order to avoid more carbon emissions". Friend Reviews. For example, he suggested that opposition by environmentalists, such as himself, to the development of nuclear energy had speeded up climate change, and that GM crops were necessary to feed the world. Other Editions 7. For most, the book is going to be emotionally draining. The God Species incorporates not only ecology but also politics and economics in the environmental-protection arena. The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans Overall there is a sense that this book simplifies and selectively presents evidence that supports his World view i. Homo sapiens have acquired God-like powers to transform the world and destroy life. We do. Get it to that point and then we'll talk. Jul 09, Bricoleur David Soul is currently reading it. Not always convinced by the depth of research and accuracy, nor that the potential ways forward have been fully thought through but altogether a good overview. Lynas writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian. Lynas provides a good overview of the planetary boundaries that we must figure out how to live within, and challenges the assumptions of many environmentalists on what will be needed to achieve those goals. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. That the author used to be one of these muddleheaded romantics himself makes it all the more convincing. Show More. Retrieved 22 July The sections on species loss are especially harsh, as we are currently witnessing the most rapid extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs. More filters. This article about a book on the environment is a The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition. Why the Earth has become—and has remained—a habitable planet is one of the most extraordinary stories in science. The boundaries--which cover things such as the maximum amount of CO2 in the environment, the maximum sustainable loss of spe This is a very provocative analysis of the current environmental issues facing the earth. Only they can provide the food for the billions of future inhabitants that will populate our planet, Lynas claims. How about just letting people decide for themselves? The public is in terrible need of a discussion along the lines that Lynas proposes in his book. I can accept that maybe the risks of climate change are greater than these risks, and therefore lesser evils need to be accepted and dealt with, but these are not insignificant. Sep 06, Elizabeth Hauke rated it liked it. Worried about global warming? More to come To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. I agree with the solutions given by The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition author. The Guardian. It conveys the urgency and the current standing of the humanity but since the book was written in the data might be a little outdated. Other Editions 7. At footnote 46, Lynas reports that there was a temperature rise in Greenland On the other hand, this will not work well in the Gobi desert, which is much too far away from any source of salt water. A fantastic read. With wind energy, I recognize the need to keep damage to birds and bats as low as possible. This concept is a central plank of systems theory, and seems to apply universally to successful complex systems from the internet to ant colonies. It is our choice what happens from here. That might be somewhat more controversial. Lynas discusses energy from the desert at footnotes 64 and following. Or that in comparison to the electricity actually consumed in France the generation percentage of nuclear and renewable energy is already over percent. Jan 05, Jan Denn rated it it was amazing Shelves: nonfiction. However to me it felt like the author downplayed the misuse The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition fertilizers in favor of increased use towards lesser land use per capita. While I plan to discuss it here once I get it on my Kindle, it might be fun to briefly note a couple of thoughts going through my head when reading just that title. The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas – review If there was no anti-nuclear movement, Fukushima One might have been replaced ten years ago by a state-of-the-art Thorium reactor or fast breeder with absolutely fail-safe passive safety designs that rely only on gravity. Some of the authors recommendations may seem controversial, but I honestly believe he shows a realistic way to resolve environmental issues. This astounding four-billion-year track record of self-regulating success makes the Earth unique certainly in the solar system and possibly the entire universe. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. I'd say that his central suggestion that strong governmental policy is needed on a global scale is spot The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1st edition, but I think he places too much faith in markets to sort out our various Loads of studied insight, but with many unsavoury suggestions. That the author used to be one of these muddleheaded romantics himself makes it all the more convincing. The book presents certain boundaries, or thresholds, that should be kept in check if we want to experience prosperity while living in harmony with our nonhuman friends. A brisk counter- punch to the scientifically-illiterate western middle-class types who hope to persuade the relatively impoverished majority of humanity to give up any hope of a future of increased personal comfort such as they themselves enjoy in order to be dirt-poor subsistence farmers, despite the fact that even if we we tilled every inch of the earth we would still require to somehow magic away half of the present world population. He invented the secondary condenser, which transformed the efficiency of existing steam engines. Mark Lynas. Unfortunately, while humans have great powers to change things, not all of these changes are thought through and sustainable in the long run.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Endangered Species and Biodiversity Vol
    Endangered Species and Biodiversity Vol. 4, 2018, pages 199-203 H Rolston III, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States ã 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. An Anthropocene Biosphere Humans and Endangered Species The End of Nature Geoengineered Biodiversity Ecomodern Conservation Creative Biogenesis References “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor.” “Protecting biodiversity for its own sake has not worked. Protecting nature that is dynamic and resilient, that is in our midst rather than far away, and that sustains human communities— these are the ways forward now. Otherwise, conservation will fail, clinging to its old myths” (Kareiva et al., 2011, pp. 36, 37). We need a “New Conservation” ethic. So argue prominent enthusiasts for the Anthropocene. The International Commission on Stratigraphy has a working group that has recommended Anthropocene as a geological unit (Waters et al., 2016). Beyond the geology, Anthropocene has become a Promethean term, what philosophers call an “elevator word,” and put to use revising worldviews, asserting the dominant human place in nature and conservation policy, as in the title of Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier, “Conservation in the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene has its proponents and equally its critics, well illustrated in contrasting views of endangered species and biodiversity. An Anthropocene Biosphere In a Dictionary of Ecology, Allaby (2005) tells us: “The biosphere itself, at levels from the genetic to the landscape, is increasingly a human product.” These human effects, however, are often negative.
    [Show full text]
  • Jeremy Baskin, “Paradigm Dressed As Epoch: the Ideology of The
    Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene JEREMY BASKIN School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Victoria 3010, Australia Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed as epoch. In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move pro- motes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoen- gineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept’s radical core can be retrieved. KEYWORDS Anthropocene, ideology, geoengineering, environmental politics, earth management INTRODUCTION ‘The Anthropocene’ is an emergent idea, which posits that the human spe- cies is now the dominant Earth-shaping force. Initially promoted by scholars from the physical and earth sciences, it argues that we have exited the current geological epoch, the 12,000-year-old Holocene, and entered a new epoch, Environmental Values 24 (2015): 9–29.
    [Show full text]
  • The Anthropocene
    The Anthropocene The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea Rob Nixon Time gets thicker, light gets dim 1 Allen Ginsberg, “The Gates of Wrath” What does it mean to imagine Homo sapiens as not merely a historical but a geo- logical actor, a force of such magnitude that our impacts are being written into the fossil record? What does it mean to acknowledge that, for the first time in Earth’s history, a sentient species, our own, has shaken Earth’s life systems with a pro- fundity that paleontologist Anthony Barnosky has likened to an asteroid strike? How does that perceptual shift disturb widespread assumptions about the deep past and the far future, about planetary history, human power relations, and the dynamics between humans and nonhuman agents of Earth’s metamorphosis? If our actions have become geologically consequential, leaving an enduring archive that will be legible for tens or even hundreds of millennia to come, what will that archive disclose about social relations, above all, about the unequal weight of human communities possessing disparate earth- changing powers? And, in terms of the history of ideas, why now? Why has the idea of Homo sapiens as a fused biological- geological force gained traction in the second decade of the twenty- first century, when in the twentieth century geologists typically dismissed our species’ occupancy of this planet as not just ephemeral but as geologically trivial? Such consequential questions follow from the turn to the Anthropocene, a hypothesis advanced by Nobel Prize– winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Chicago Press.
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Z. Cannon
    VIRGINIA JOURNAL FINDING A WAY FORWARD ON THE ENVIRONMENT U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS enacted in the late 1960s and 1970s were successful in addressing a number of the pressing issues that gave rise to the modern environmental movement. But daunting issues remain, such as climate change, species loss, and watershed degradation, while the public debate about environmen- tal law and policy is more polarized than ever. Jonathan Cannon’s perspectives on these issues grow from a career in environmental law that encompasses, in roughly equal portions, private practice, government service, and teaching and scholarship. This combination is unusual among environmental law scholars and helps give Cannon’s insights a distinctive balance and persuasiveness. Cannon’s interest in the environment began with a youthful delight in the outdoors, which continues unabated into his seventy-first year. It grew with his attraction as an undergraduate English major to the English romantic poets Wordsworth and Keats and to American writ- ers such as Thoreau and Whitman. Cannon’s undergraduate training as a critical reader of literary texts would later become instrumental in his distinctive interpretation of environmental texts, most notably the Supreme Court’s opinions in major environmental cases. In this aspect of his work, Cannon explores the significance of these opin- ions as cultural as well as legal texts. Equally important to Cannon’s scholarship was his decades-long apprenticeship as a lawyer in the private practice of environmental law and as a senior official in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, charged with shaping and implementing national environmental policy. Stemming from this experience, a second strain of Cannon’s scholarly work is a pragmatic JONATHAN Z.
    [Show full text]
  • 16 Environmental Ethics for Tomorrow Sustaining the Biosphere Holmes Rolston III
    Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, eds. Sustainability: Key Issues. London: Routledge, Earthscan, 2015 16 Environmental ethics for tomorrow Sustaining the biosphere Holmes Rolston III Sustainability What do we want for tomorrow? What ought we to want? Sustainability!! But of course! "Sustaining" is rather similar to "surviving," and nobody can be against it. The basic principle of people living on landscapes is that past and present continue into the future. But what are you for? Some answers are quite inclusive: All living things ought to be sustained, equally people and nature, and these two go together. "Sustainable devel- opment," Ronald Engel tells us, with emphasis, "may be defined as the kind of human activity that nourishes and perpetuates the historical ful- fillment of the whole community of life on Earth" (Engel 1990, 10-11). Such answers are both generous and nonspecific, giving little guidance for ethics or policy. Proponents argue that sustainability is useful just because it is a wide-angle lens. The specifics are unspecified, giving peoples and nations the freedom and responsibility of self-development (although the UN has further sug- gested some indicators of sustainable development, United Nations Depart- ment of Economic and Social Affairs 2007). This is an orienting concept that is at once directed and encompassing, a coalition-level policy that sets aspira- tions and thresholds, and allows pluralist strategies for their accomplish- ment. Work your development out however you wish - provided only that it is sustainable into the future. Critics reply that sustainability has proved to be an umbrella concept so diffuse that it requires little but superficial agreement, bringing a con- stant illusion of consensus, glossing over deeper problems with a rhetori- cally engaging word.
    [Show full text]
  • Why I Can't Love Nuclear
    going local earth rights Imposed technocratic ‘solutions’ to climate change are not the answer, says Martin Stott institutions such as the hospital, starting with a sustainable laundry business. The second project is a renewable energy company, starting with why I can’t installations on the hospital roof. This is fascinating because it combines two elements: the new co-operatives that employ local love nuclear people, and the ability to redirect the spending power of the local hospital to launch them and underpin them. ‘The implication for planners is that they will have another dimension to look at when A year has passed since the meltdown of the they are considering a Fukushima Daichi nuclear power complex after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. Globally, struggling neighbourhood. reaction has been mixed, with some countries As well as looking at the fabric reaffirming their intention to get out of civil nuclear power, others reviewing the implications, and others of the place and the available deciding that given the particular circumstances land, they will also need to there are few, if any, lessons to be learned. look at where the money is The reaction of some leading commentators in the environmental movement has been very striking, flowing – and how can it flow George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian on 21 March better around the places that 2011, just 13 days after the tsunami which triggered the multiple meltdowns – ‘Why Fukushima made me really need it’ stop worrying and love nuclear power’1 – stands as an example. Monbiot is not alone. Stuart (Whole Earth The key point is that a project such as this Catalog) Brand, James Lovelock and Mark Lynas requires no new money.
    [Show full text]
  • The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet... Free
    FREE THE GOD SPECIES: HOW HUMANS REALLY CAN SAVE THE PLANET... PDF Mark Lynas | 288 pages | 02 Feb 2012 | HarperCollins Publishers | 9780007375226 | English | London, United Kingdom The God Species - Wikipedia The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging where packaging is applicable. Packaging The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet. be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an unprinted box or plastic bag. See details for additional description. What does this price mean? This is the price excluding postage and handling fees a seller has provided at which the same item, or one that is nearly identical to it, is being offered for sale or has been offered for sale in the recent past. The price may be the seller's own price elsewhere or another seller's price. The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet. "off" amount and percentage simply signifies the calculated difference between the seller-provided price for the item elsewhere and the seller's price on eBay. Skip to main content. About this product. Stock photo. Brand new: Lowest price The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging where packaging is applicable. The green movement has got it very wrong. Nature no longer controls our planet - it is humanity, 'the god species', that must save the environment we have inflicted unprecedented damage upon. And the tools we must use are the very technologies that environmentalist have told us for years will spell disaster: nuclear power, GM food and geo-engineering.
    [Show full text]
  • After Preservation?
    Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne, eds., After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans. University of Chicago Press, 2015. After Preservation? DYNAMIC NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Holmes Rolston III We have entered the first century in 45 million centuries of life on Earth in which one species can jeopardize the planet's future. Since Galileo, Earth seemed a minor planet, lost in the stars. Since Darwin, humans have come late and last on this lonely planet. Today, on our home planet at least, we are putting these once de-centered humans back at the center. This is the An- thropocene epoch, and this high profile discourse comes to showcase the expanding human empire. Humans will manage the planet. We need to figure, perhaps re-figure conservation in this novel future in which we celebrate a new epoch and name it after ourselves. Preserving and/versus Conserving There is a widespread distinction, somewhat unfortunate, be- tween nature "preservation" and "conservation." We inherit this from John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot, the first head of the US Forest Service, argued his "fight for conservation": "The first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon — Out of this attack on what nature has given us we have won a kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are new in the world." The manifest destiny of Ameri- cans is to tame the continent. Muir thought this arrogant, and founded the Sierra Club, pas- After Preservation? 33 Figure 5.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature
    Environmental Humanities, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 129-147 www.environmentalhumanities.org ISSN: 2201-1919 PROVOCATION On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature Eileen Crist Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, USA ABSTRACT This paper examines the recent proposal to christen our geological epoch “the Anthropocene.” The reasoning offered for this new name is that humanity’s enormous mark on the geological strata would be a discernible boundary to future geologists; therefore a change in nomenclature is called for to reflect our transition out of the Holocene (our epoch’s current formal name). I argue, however, that the pitch for the Anthropocene goes well beyond this rationale. The Anthropocene has morphed into a discourse that is organizing the perception of a world picture (past, present, and future) through a set of ideas and prescriptions that is tenaciously anthropocentric; indeed, the championed name itself—Anthropocene, or the age of Man—evokes the human-centeredness that is at the root of our ecological predicament. The main argument of this paper is that the discourse of the Anthropocene refuses to challenge human dominion, proposing instead technological and managerial approaches that would make human dominion sustainable. By the same token, the Anthropocene discourse blocks from consideration the possibility of abolishing a way of life founded on the domination of nature. In conclusion, I submit that while technological and managerial approaches have a place in addressing ecological problems, our predicament primarily calls for a drastic pulling back and scaling down of the human presence—welcoming limitations of our numbers, economies, forms of habitation, and uses of land and sea, so that humanity may flourish together with the entire breadth of Life.
    [Show full text]
  • The Anthropocene: an Engineered Age?
    The Anthropocene: An engineered age? A lecture to the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 28 October 2014 Clive Hamilton Today I’d like to provide an overview of a new way of understanding the Earth and the profound predicament now faced by humankind. I plan to take a panoramic view rather than to go into depth. A new geological epoch For many years ecologists have been warning that humans have been disturbing ecosystems far and wide. But now scientists are saying something new, that human activity has disrupted the Earth system as a whole. We are disturbing the natural processes that govern the Earth’s evolution—the distribution of carbon around the Earth, the acidity of the oceans, the nitrogen cycle, the global water cycle and so on, the great natural cycles and processes that constitute the Earth as an entity in an unceasing state of flux. So profound has been the influence of humans that Earth system scientists are now proposing that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans, defined by the fact that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system”.1 1 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeil, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and historical perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011), pp. 842–67 1 I cannot stress too strongly that we are not simply describing the further spread of human impact on Earth but a shift in its nature.
    [Show full text]
  • Climate Change and the Gospel – David Atkinson
    1 Climate Change and the Gospel Why we in the churches need to treat climate change more urgently David Atkinson, Epiphany 2015 Why are we in the Christian Church so slow in responding to the most important moral issue of our generation: climate change? If the climate scientists are right, and there is a huge majority agreement in the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,1 much of the earth could be uninhabitable for humans in 100 years’ time, and the world my grandchildren inherit could be very different from today’s world, and a much more painful place to live in. And yet the large majority of Christian people are carrying on as though business is as usual. Of course, I’m not being quite fair. There have been huge numbers of Christian initiatives, many of which I outlined in my 2008 booK Renewing the Face of the Earth2 – and since then a great deal more has happened. The Church in South Africa produced a fine report.3 In the UK the ecumenical study Hope in God’s Future4 was published; Christian Aid, CAFOD, Tearfund, Green Christian (formerly Christian Ecology Link), A Rocha, John Ray Initiative and others have all made substantial contributions. Operation Noah launched a paper, ‘Climate change and the purposes of God’ (that has become known as the ‘Ash Wednesday Declaration’) in 2012, signed by Archbishops Desmond Tutu, Rowan Williams and Barry Morgan as well as a number of other UK Church leaders from Baptist, Roman Catholic, Methodist, URC, evangelical and Orthodox Churches.
    [Show full text]
  • Planetary Boundaries: Challenging Environmental Orthodoxies British Pugwash Discussion Meeting 6 July 2011
    Planetary Boundaries: Challenging Environmental Orthodoxies British Pugwash discussion meeting 6 July 2011 Presentations Professor Johan Rockström is Professor in Natural Resources Management at Stockholm University and executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Stockholm Resilience Centre. An internationally recognized scientist on global sustainability issues, he led the recent development of the new Planetary Boundaries framework for human development in the current era of rapid global change. He is lead author of two benchmark scientific publications on planetary boundaries. Professor Rockström outlined the concept of planetary boundaries developed by an international group of earth scientists and systems analysts. They examined evidence of the complex impacts of growing anthropogenic pressures on the planet, using a merger of earth science and complex systems analysis to attempt to quantify a state which would avoid catastrophic change and to identify resilience, mixing natural change and social science. They propose nine planetary boundaries and argue that each of these, if breached, risks causing a catastrophic failure of earth systems. There is now growing understanding of non-linear change, which is already evident in the complex interactions between these planetary boundaries. Complex systems are not operating in the incremental or linear fashion expected. Some areas have a ‘slow burn’ that controls the resilience of the system –making it even more difficult to assess thresholds – for example, nitrogen
    [Show full text]